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THE 



INDICATOR, 

AND 

THE COMPANION; 

A, MISCELLANY FOR THE FIELDS AND THE FIRE-SIDE. 



PART I. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The Indicator, a series of papers originally published in weekly numbers, having been long out of 
print, and repeated calls having been made for it among the booksellers, the author has here made a 
selection, comprising the greater portion of the articles, and omitting such only as he unwillingly put. 
forth in the hurry of periodical publication, or as seemed otherwise unsuited for present publication, 
either by the nature of their disquisitions, or from containing commendatory criticisms now rendered 
superfluous by the reputation of the works criticised. 

The Companion, a subsequent publication of the same sort, has been treated in the like manner. 

The author has little further to say, by way of advertisement to these pages, except that both 
the works were written with the same view of inculcating a love of nature and imagination, and of 
furnishing a sample of the enjoyment which they afford ; and he cannot give a better proof of that 
enjoyment, as far as he was capable of it, than by stating, that both were written during times of great 
trouble with him, and both helped him to see much of that fair play between his own anxieties and 
his natural cheerfulness, of which an indestructible belief in the good and the beautiful has rendered 
him perhaps not undeserving. 

London, Dec. 6, 1833. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGK 

I. DIFFICULTY OF FINDING A NAME FOR A WORK OF THIS KIND . . 1 



II. A WORD ON TRANSLATION FROM THE POETS 



* 



ILL AUTUMNAL COMMENCEMENT OF FIRES— MANTEL-PIECES— APARTMENTS 

FOR STUDY ib. 

IV. ACONTIUS'S APPLE . 3 

V. GODIVA 4 

VI. PLEASANT MEMORIES CONNECTED WITH VARIOUS PARTS OF THE METRO- 
POLIS 5 

V 
VH. ADVICE TO THE MELANCHOLY 8 



VIE CHARLES BRANDON, AND MARY QUEEN OF FRANCE 9 

IX. ON THE HOUSEHOLD GODS OF THE ANCIENTS . .10 

X. SOCIAL GENEALOGY „ . 12 

XI. ANGLING . . • 13 

XH. LUDICROUS EXAGGERATION 15 

XIII. GILBERT! GILBERT! 16 

XIV. FATAL MISTAKE OF NERVOUS DISORDERS FOR MADNESS . . > . 17 
XV. MISTS AND FOGS - 19 

XVI. THE SHOEMAKER OF VEYROS ... . ... 21 

XVII. MORE NEWS OF ULYSSES ... 22 

XVIII. FAR COUNTRIES . 24 

XIX. A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER 26 

XX. THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN . . 30 

XXI. A FEW THOUGHTS ON SLEEP l^\ ** 

XXII. THE FAIR REVENGE .... . • . . 44 



iv CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAOK 

XXIII. SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY .... 47 

XXIV. GETTING UP ON COLD MORNINGS . . . . 49 
XXV. THE OLD GENTLEMAN 50 

XXVI. DOLPHINS 52 

XXVII. RONALD OP THE PERFECT HAND . . ,?>. 

XXVIII. A CHAPTER ON HATS ... 56 

XXIX. SEAMEN ON SHORE 59 

XXX. ON THE REALITIES OF IMAGINATION 62 

XXXI. DEATHS OF LITTLE CHILDREN 66 

XXXII. POETICAL ANOMALIES OF SHAPE 67 

XXXIII. SPRING AND DAISIES 68 

XXXIV. MAY-DAY 71 

XXXV. SHAKSPEARE'S BIRTH-DAY 74 

XXXVI. LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY 75 

XXXVII. OF STICKS ...... . .... 76 

XXXVIH. OF THE SIGHT OF SHOPS 79 

XXXIX. A NEARER VIEW OF SOME OF THE SHOPS . . 81 



THE INDICATOR. 



There is a bird in the interior of Africa, whose habits would rather seem to belong to the interior of Fairy-land : 
but they have been well authenticated. It indicates to honey-hunters, where the nests of wild bees are to be 
found. It calls them with a cheerful cry, which they answer ; and on finding itself recognized, flies and hovers 
over a hollow tree containing the honey. While they are occupied in collecting it, the bird goes to a little distance, 
where he observes all that passes ; and the hunters, when they have helped themselves, take care to leave him 
his portion of the food. — This is the Cuculus Indicator of Linnaeus, otherwise called the Moroc, Bee Cuckoo, or 
Honey Bird. 

There he, arriving, round about doth flie, 

And takes survey with busie, curious eye : 

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly^— Spenser. 



I.— DIFFICULTY OF FINDING A NAME 
FOR A WORK OF THIS KIND. 

Never did gossips, when assembled to deter- 
mine the name of a new-born child, whose 
family was full of conflicting interests, experi- 
ence a difficulty half so great, as that which 
an author undergoes in settling the title for a 
periodical work. In the former case, there is 
generally some paramount uncle, or prodi- 
gious third cousin, who is understood to have 
the chief claims, and to the golden lustre of 
whose face the clouds of hesitation and jealousy 
gradually give way. But these children of the 
brain have no godfather at hand : and yet 
their single appellation is bound to comprise 
as many public interests, as all the Christian 
names of a French or a German prince. It is 
to be modest : it is to be expressive : it is to 
be new : it is to be striking : it is to have 
something in it equally intelligible to the man 
of plain understanding, and surprising for the 
man of imagination : — in a word, it is to be 
impossible. 

How far we have succeeded in the attain- 
ment of this happy nonentity, we leave others 
to judge. There is one good thing however 
which the hunt after a title is sure to realise ; 
— a great deal of despairing mirth. We were 
visiting a friend the other night, who can do 
anything for a book but give it a title ; and 
after many grave and ineffectual attempts to 
furnish one for the present, the company, after 
the fashion of Rabelais, and with a chair- 
shaking merriment which he himself might 
have joined in, fell to turning a hopeless thing 



into a jest. It was like that exquisite picture 
of a set of laughers in Shakspeare : — 

One rubbed his elbow, thus ; and fleered, and swore, 

A better speech was never spoke before : 

Another, with his finger and his thumb, 

Cried " Via ! We will do't, come what will come !" 

The third he capered, and cried " All goes well I" 

The fourth turned on the toe, and down he fell. 

With that they all did tumble on the ground, 

With such a zealous laughter, so profound, 

That in this spleen ridiculous, appears, 

To check their laughter, passion's solemn tears. 

Love's Labour's Lost. 

Some of the names had a meaning in their 
absurdity, such as the Adviser, or Helps for 
Composing ; — the Cheap Reflector, or Every 
Man His Own Looking-Glass ; — the Retailer, 
or Every Man His Own Other Man's Wit ; — 
Nonsense, To be continued. Others were 
laughable by the mere force of contrast, as 
the Crocodile, or Pleasing Companion ; — Chaos, 
or the Agreeable Miscellany ; — the Fugitive 
Guide ; — the Foot Soldier, or Flowers of Wit ; 
— Bigotry, or the Cheerful Instructor ; — the 
Polite Repository of Abuse ; — Blood, being a 
Collection of Light Essays. Others were sheer 
ludicrousness and extravagance, as the Pleas- 
ing Ancestor ; the Silent Companion ; the 
Tart ; the Leg of Beef, by a Layman ; the 
Ingenious Hatband ; the Boots of Bliss ; the 
Occasional Diner ; the Tooth-ache ; Recollec- 
tions of a Very Unpleasant Nature ; Thoughts 
on Taking up a Pair of Snuffers ; Thoughts on 
a Barouche-box ; Thoughts on a Hill of Con- 
siderable Eminence ; Meditations on a Pleas- 
ing Idea ; Materials for Drinking ; the Knocker, 
No. I. ; — the Hippopotamus entered at Sta- 



THE INDICATOR. 



tioners' Hall ; the Piano-forte of Paulus 
JEmilius ; the Seven Sleepers at Cards ; the 
Arabian Nights on Horseback : — with an 
infinite number of other mortal murders of 
common sense, which rose to " push us from 
our stools," and which none but the wise or 
good-natured would think of enjoying. 



II.— A WORD ON TRANSLATION FROM 
THE POETS. 

Intelligent men of no scholarship, on 
reading Horace, Theocritus, and other poets, 
through the medium of translation, have often 
wondered how those writers obtained their 
glory. And they well might. The transla- 
tions are no more like the original, than a 
walking-stick is like a flowering bough. It is 
the same with the versions of Euripides, of 
iEschylus, of Sophocles, of Petrarch, of Boileau, 
&c. &c, and in many respects of Homer. 
Perhaps we could not give the reader a more 
brief, yet complete specimen of the way in 
which bad translations are made, than by 
selecting a well-known passage from Shaks- 
peare, and turning it into the common-place 
kind of poetry that flourished so widely among 
us till of late years. Take the passage, for 
instance, where the lovers in the Merchant 
of Venice seat themselves on a bank by moon- 
light :- 

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this hank ! 
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 
Creep in our ears ; soft stillness, and the night, 
Become the touches of sweet harmony. 

Now a foreign translator, of the ordinary 
kind, would dilute and take all taste and fresh- 
ness out of this draught of poetry, in a style 
somewhat like the following : — 

With what a charm, the moon, serene and bright, 
Lends on the bank its soft reflected light ! 
Sit we, I pray ; and let us sweetly hear 
The strains melodious with a raptured ear ; 
For soft retreats, and night's impressive hour, 
To harmony impart divinest power. 



ni.— AUTUMNAL COMMENCEMENT OF FIRES— 
MANTEL-PIECES— APARTMENTS FOR STUDY. 

How pleasant it is to have fires again ! We 
have not time to regret summer, when the cold 
fogs begin to force us upon the necessity of a 
new kind of warmth ; — a warmth not so fine 
as sunshine, but, as manners go, more sociable. 
The English get together over their fires, as 
the Italians do in their summer-shade. We 
do not enjoy our sunshine as we ought ; our 
climate seems to render us almost unaware 
that the weather is fine, when it really becomes 
so : but for the same reason, we make as much 
of our winter, as the anti-social habits that have 
grown upon us from other causes will allow. 



And for a similar reason, the southern Euro- 
pean is unprepared for a cold day. The houses 
in many parts of Italy are summer-houses, 
unprepared for winter ; so that when a fit of 
cold weather comes, the dismayed inhabitant, 
walking and shivering about with a little 
brazier in his hands, presents an awkward 
image of insufficiency and perplexity. A few 
of our fogs, shutting up the sight of everything 
out of doors, and making the trees and the 
eaves of the houses drip like rain, would ad- 
monish him to get warm in good earnest. If 
"the web of our life" is always to be "of a 
mingled yarn," a good warm hearth-rug is not 
the worst part of the manufacture. 

Here we are then again, with our fire before 
us, and our books on each side. What shall 
we do ? Shall we take out a Life of somebody, 
or a Theocritus, or Petrarch, or Ariosto, or 
Montaigne, or Marcus Aurelius, or Moliere, 
or Shakspeare who includes them all ? Or 
shall we read an engraving from Poussin or 
Raphael ? Or shall we sit with tilted chairs, 
planting our wrists upon our knees, and toast- 
ing the up-turned palms of our hands, while 
we discourse of manners and of man's heart 
and hopes, with at least a sincerity, a good 
intention, and good-nature, that shall warrant 
what we say with the sincere, the good-in- 
tentioned, and the good-natured ? 

Ah — take care. You see what that old- 
looking saucer is, with a handle to it ? It is a 
venerable piece of earthenware, which may 
have been worth, to an Athenian, about two- 
pence ; but to an author, is worth a great deal 
more than ever he could — deny for it. And 
yet he would deny it too. It will fetch his 
imagination more than ever it fetched potter 
or penny-maker. Its little shallow circle over- 
flows for him with the milk and honey of a 
thousand pleasant associations. This is one of 
the uses of having mantel-pieces. You may 
often see on no very rich mantel-piece a 
representative body of all the elements phy- 
sical and intellectual — a shell for the sea, a 
stuffed bird or some feathers for the air, a 
curious piece of mineral for the earth, a glass 
of water with some flowers in it for the visible 
process of creation, — a cast from sculpture for 
the mind of man ; — and underneath all, is the 
bright and ever-springing fire, running up 
through them heavenwards, like hope through 
materiality. We like to have any little 
curiosity of the mantel-piece kind within our 
reach and inspection. For the same reason, 
we like a small study, where we are almost in 
contact with our books. We like to feel them 
about us ; — to be in the arms of our mistress 
Philosophy, rather than see her at a distance. 
To have a huge apartment for a study is like 
lying in the great bed at Ware, or being snug 
on a mile-stone upon Hounslow Heath. It is 
space and physical activity, not repose and 
concentration. It is fit only for grandeur and 



ACONTIUS'S APPLE. 



ostentation, — for those who have secretaries, 
and are to be approached like gods in a temple. 
The Archbishop of Toledo, no doubt, wrote 
his homilies in a room ninety feet long. 
The Marquis Marialva must have been ap- 
proached by Gil Bias through whole ranks of 
glittering authors, standing at due distance. 
But Ariosto, whose mind could fly out of its 
nest over all nature, wrote over the house he 
built, <e parva,sed apta miW — small, but suited 
to me. However, it is to be observed, that he 
could not afford a larger. He was a Duode- 
narian, in that respect, like ourselves. We 
do not know how our ideas of a study might 
expand with our walls. Montaigne, who was 
Montaigne " of that ilk" and lord of a great 
chateau, had a study " sixteen paces in diame- 
ter, with three noble and free prospects." He 
congratulates himself, at the same time, on its 
circular figure, evidently from a feeling allied 
to the one in favour of smallness. " The figure 
of my study," says he, " is round, and has no 
more flat (bare) wall, than what is taken up 
by my table and my chairs ; so that the remain- 
ing parts of the circle present me with a view 
of all my books at once, set upon five degrees 
of shelves round about me." (Cotton's Montaigne, 
b. 3, ch. 3.) 

A great prospect we hold to be a very dis- 
putable advantage, upon the same reasoning 
as before ; but we like to have some green 
boughs about our windows, and to fancy our- 
selves as much as possible in the country, 
when we are not there. Milton expressed a 
wish with regard to his study, extremely suit- 
able to our present purpose. He would have 
the lamp in it seen ; thus letting others into a 
share of his enjoyments, by the imagination of 
them. 

And let my lamp at midnight hour 
Be seen in some high lonely tower, 
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear 
With thrice-great Hermes ; or unsphere 
The Spirit of Plato, to unfold 
What world or what vast regions hold 
The immortal mind, that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshly nook. 

There is a fine passionate burst of enthu- 
siasm on the subject of a study, in Fletcher's 
play of the Elder Brother, Act 1, Scene 2 : 

Sordid and dunghill minds, composed of earth, 

In that gross element fix all their happiness : 

But purer spirits, purged and refined. 

Shake off that clog of human frailty. Give me 

Leave to enjoy myself. That place, that does 

Contain my hooks, the hest companions, is 

To me a glorious court, where hourly I 

Converse with the old sages and philosophers ; 

And sometimes for variety I confer 

With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels ; 

Calling their victories, if unjustly got, 

Unto a strict account ; and in my fancy, 

Deface their ill-placed statues. Can I then 

Part with such constant pleasures, to embrace 

Uncertain vanities ? No, be it your care 

To augment a heap of wealth : it shall he mine 

To increase in knowledge. Lights there, for my study. 



IV.— ACONTIUS'S APPLE. 

Acontius was a youth of the island of Cea 
(now Zia), who at the sacrifices in honour of 
Diana fell in love with the beautiful virgin, 
Cydippe. Unfortunately she was so much 
above him in rank, that he had no hope of 
obtaining her hand in the usual way ; but the 
wit of a lover helped him to an expedient. 
There was a law in Cea, that any oath, pro- 
nounced in the temple of Diana, was irrevo- 
cably binding. Acontius got an apple, and 
writing some words upon it, pitched it into 
Cydippe's bosom. 

The words were these : 

MA THN APTEMIN AKONTIH TAMOYMAI. 

By Dian, I will marry Acontius. 

Or as a poet has written them : 

Juro tibi sanctas per mystica sacra Dianas, 

Me tibi venturam comitem, sponsamque futuram. 

I swear by holy Dian, I will be 

Thy bride betrothed, and bear thee company. 

Cydippe read, and married herself. — It is 
said that she was repeatedly on the eve of 
being married to another person ; but her 
imagination, in the shape of the Goddess, as 
often threw her into a fever ; and the lover, 
whose ardour and ingenuity had made an im- 
pression upon her, was made happy. Aris- 
tsenetus in his Epistles calls the apple kvBoiuiov 
lirjXov, a Cretan apple, which is supposed to 
mean a quince ; or as others think, an orange, 
or a citron. But the apple was, is, and must 
be, a true, unsophisticated apple. Nothing 
else would have suited. " The apples, me- 
thought," says Sir Philip Sydney of his heroine 
in the Arcadia, a fell down from the trees to 
do homage to the apples of her breast." The 
idea seems to have originated with Theocritus 
(Idyl. 27, v. 50, edit. Valckenaer), from whom 
it was copied by the Italian writers. It makes 
a lovely figure in one of the most famous pas- 
sages of Ariosto, where he describes the beauty 
of Alcina {Orlando Furioso, canto 7, st. 14) — 

Bianca neve e il bel collo, e '1 petto latte : 

II collo e tondo, il petto colmo e largo : 
Due pome acerbe, e pur d' avorio fatte. 
Vengono e van come onda al primo margo, 
Q,uando piacevole aura il mar combatte. 

Her bosom is like milk, her neck like snow ; 
A rounded neck ; a bosom, where you see 
Two crisp young ivory apples come and go, 
Like waves that on the shore beat tenderly, 
When a sweet air is ruffling to and fro. 

And after him, Tasso, in his fine ode on the 
Golden Age : — 

Allor tra fiori e linfe 

Traean dolci carole 

Gli Amoretti senz' archi e senza faci : 

Sedean pastori e ninfe 

Meschiando a le parole 

Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i baci 

Strettamente tenaci. 

R 2 



THE INDICATOR. 



La verginella ignude 

Scopria sue fresche rose 

Ch' or tien Bel velo ascose, 

E le pome del seno, acerbe e crude ; 

E spesso o in flume o in lago 

Scherzar si vide con V amata il vago. 

Then among streams and flowers, 

The little Winged Powers 

Went singing carols, without torch or bow ; 

The nymphs and shepherds sat 

Mingling with innocent chat 

Sports and low whispers, and with whispers low 

Kisses that would not go. 

The maiden, budding o'er, 

Kept not her bloom uneyed, 

Which now a veil must hide, 

Nor the crisp apples which her bosom bore : 

And oftentimes in river or in lake, 

The lover and his love their merry bath would take. 

Honi soit qui mal y pense. 



V.— GODIVA. 

This is the lady who, under the title of 
Countess of Coventry, used to make such a 
figure in our childhood upon some old pocket- 
pieces of that city. "We hope she is in request 
there still ; otherwise the inhabitants deserve 
to be sent from Coventry. That city was 
famous in saintly legends for the visit of the 
eleven thousand virgins, — an " incredible 
number," quoth Selden. But the eleven thou- 
sand virgins have vanished with their credi- 
bility, and a noble-hearted woman of flesh and 
blood is Coventry's true immortality. 

The story of Godiva is not a fiction, as many 
suppose it. At least it is to be found in 
Matthew of Westminster, and is not of a 
nature to have been a mere invention. Her 
name, and that of her husband, Leofric, are 
mentioned in an old charter recorded by 
another early historian. That the story is 
omitted by Hume and others, argues little 
against it ; for the latter are accustomed to 
confound the most interesting anecdotes of 
times and manners with something below the 
dignity of history (a very absurd mistake) ; 
and Hume, of whose philosophy better things 
might have been expected, is notoriously less 
philosophical in his history than in any other 
of his works. A certain coldness of tempera- 
ment, not unmixed with aristocratical pride, 
or at least with a great aversion from every- 
thing like vulgar credulity, rendered his scep- 
ticism so extreme, that it became a sort of 
superstition in turn, and blinded him to the 
claims of every species of enthusiasm, civil as 
well as religious. Milton, with his poetical 
eyesight, saw better, when he meditated the 
history of his native country. We do not 
remember whether he relates the present 
story, but we remember well, that at the begin- 
ning of his fragment on that subject, he says 
he shall relate doubtful stories as well as 
authentic ones, for the benefit of those, if no 



others, who will know how to make use of 
them, namely, the poets* We have faith, 
however, in the story ourselves. It has innate 
evidence enough for us, to give full weight to 
that of the old annalist. Imagination can in- 
vent a good deal ; affection more : but affection 
can sometimes do things, such as the tenderest 
imagination is not in the habit of inventing ; 
and this piece of noble-heartedness we believe 
to have been one of them. 

Leofric, Earl of Leicester, was the lord of a 
large feudal territory in the middle of England, 
of which Coventry formed a part. He lived 
in the time of Edward the Confessor ; and 
was so eminently a feudal lord, that the here- 
ditary greatness of his dominion appears to 
have been singular even at that time, and to 
have lasted with an uninterrupted succession 
from Ethelbald to the Conquest, — a period of 
more than three hundred years. He was a 
great and useful opponent of the famous Earl 
Godwin. 

Whether it was owing to Leofric or not, 
does not appear, but Coventry was subject to 
a very oppressive tollage, by which it would 
seem that the feudal despot enjoyed the greater 
part of the profit of all marketable commodities. 
The progress of knowledge has shown us how 
abominable, and even how unhappy for all 
parties, is an injustice of this description ; yet 
it gives one an extraordinary idea of the mind 
in those times, to see it capable of piercing 
through the clouds of custom, of ignorance, 
and even of self-interest, and petitioning the 
petty tyrant to forego such a privilege. This 
mind was Godiva's. The other sex, always 
more slow to admit reason through the medium 
of feeling, were then occupied to the full in 
their warlike habits. It was reserved for a 
woman to anticipate ages of liberal opinion, 
and to surpass them in the daring virtue of 
setting a principle above a custom. 

Godiva entreated her lord to give up his 
fancied right ; but in vain. At last, wishing 
to put an end to her importunities, he told 
her, either in a spirit of bitter jesting, or with 
a playful raillery that could not be bitter with 
so sweet an earnestness, that he would give 
up his tax, provided she rode through the city 
of Coventry, naked. She took him at his 
word. One may imagine the astonishment of 
a fierce unlettered chieftain, not untinged with 
chivalry, at hearing a woman, and that too of 
the greatest delicacy and rank, maintaining 
seriously her intention of acting in a manner 
contrary to all that was supposed fitting for 
her sex, and at the same time forcing upon 
him a sense of the very beauty of her conduct 
by its principled excess. It is probable, that 
* When Dr. Johnson, among his other impatient accu- 
sations of our great republican, charged him with telling 
unwarrantable stories in his history, he must have over- 
looked this announcement ; and yet, if we recollect, it is 
but in the second page of the fragment. So hasty, and 
blind, and liable to be put to shame, is prejudice. 



MEMORIES OF THE METROPOLIS. 



as he could not prevail upon her to give up 
her design, he had sworn some religious oath 
when he made his promise : but be this as it 
may, he took every possible precaution to 
secure her modesty from hurt. The people of 
Coventry were ordered to keep within doors, 
to close up all their windows and outlets, and 
not to give a glance into the streets upon pain 
of death. The day came ; and Coventry, it 
may be imagined, was silent as death. The 
lady went out at the palace door, was set on 
horseback, and at the same time divested of 
her wrapping garment, as if she had been going 
into a bath ; then taking the fillet from her 
head, she let down her long and lovely tresses, 
which poured around her body like a veil ; 
and so, with only her white legs remaining 
conspicuous, took her gentle way through the 
streets.* 

What scene can be more touching to the 
imagination — beauty, modesty, feminine soft- 
ness, a daring sympathy ; an extravagance, 
producing by the nobleness of its object and 
the strange gentleness of its means, the grave 
and profound effect of the most reverend 
custom. We may suppose the scene taking 
place in the warm noon ; the doors all shut, 
the windows closed ; the Earl and his court 
serious and wondering ; the other inhabitants, 
many of them gushing with grateful tears, and 
all reverently listening to hear the footsteps 
of the horse ; and lastly, the lady herself, with 
a downcast but not a shamefaced eye, looking 
towards the earth through her flowing locks, 
and riding through the dumb and deserted 
streets, like an angelic spirit. 

It was an honourable superstition in that 
part of the country, that a man who ventured 
to look at the fair saviour of his native town, 
was said to have been struck blind. But the 
vulgar use to which this superstition has been 
turned by some writers of late times, is not so 
honourable. The whole story is as unvulgar 
and as sweetly serious, as can be conceived. 

Drayton has not made so much of this sub- 
ject as might have been expected ; yet what 
he says is said well and earnestly : 



Coventry at length 



Prom her small mean regard, recovered state and strength ; 
By Leofric her lord, yet in hase bondage held, 
The people from her marts by tollage were expelled ; 
Whose duchess which desired this tribute to release, 
Their freedom often begged. The duke, to make her cease, 
Told her, that if she would his loss so far enforce, 
His will was, she should ride stark naked upon a horse 
By daylight through the street: which certainly he 

thought 
In her heroic breast so deeply would have wrought, 
That in her former suit she would have left to deal. 
But that most princely dame, as one devoured with zeal, 
Went on, and by that mean the city clearly freed. 

* " Nuda," says Matthew of Westminster, " equum 
ascendens, crines capitis et tricas dissolvens, corpus suum 
totum. praeter crura candidissima, inde velavit." See 
Selden's Notes to the Poli/olbion of Drayton : Song 13. It 
is Selden from whom we learn, that Leofric was Earl of 



VI.— PLEASANT MEMORIES CONNECTED WITH 
VARIOUS PARTS OF THE METROPOLIS. 

One of the best secrets of enjoyment is the 
art of cultivating pleasant associations. It is 
an art, that of necessity increases with the 
stock of our knowledge ; and though in ac- 
quiring our knowledge we must encounter 
disagreeable associations also, yet if we secure 
a reasonable quantity of health by the way, 
these will be far less in number than the 
agreeable ones : for unless the circumstances 
which gave rise to the associations press upon 
us, it is only from want of health that the 
power of throwing off these burdensome images 
becomes suspended. 

And the beauty of this art is, that it does 
not insist upon pleasant materials to work on. 
Nor indeed does health. Health will give us 
a vague sense of delight, in the midst of objects 
that would teaze and oppress us during sick- 
ness. But healthy association peoples this 
vague sense with agreeable images. It will 
comfort us, even when a painful sympathy 
with the distresses of others becomes a part 
of the very health of our minds. For instance, 
we can never go through St. Giles's, but the 
sense of the extravagant inequalities in human 
condition presses more forcibly upon us ; and 
yet some pleasant images are at hand, even 
there, to refresh it. They do not displace the 
others, so as to injure the sense of public duty 
which they excite ; they only serve to keep 
our spirits fresh for their task, and hinder 
them from running into desperation or hope- 
lessness. In St. Giles's church lie Chapman, 
the earliest and best translator of Homer ; 
and Andrew Marvell, the wit and patriot, 
whose poverty Charles the Second could not 
bribe. We are as sure to think of these two 
men, and of all the good and pleasure they 
have done to the world, as of the less happy 
objects about us. The steeple of the church 
itself, too, is a handsome one ; and there is a 
flock of pigeons in that neighbourhood, which 
we have stood with great pleasure to see 
careering about it of a fine afternoon, when a 
western wind had swept back the smoke 
towards the city, and showed the white of the 
stone steeple piercing up into a blue sky. So 
much for St. Giles's, whose very name is a 
nuisance with some. It is dangerous to speak 
disrespectfully of old districts. Who would 
suppose that the Borough was the most classical 
ground in the metropolis ! And yet it is un- 
doubtedly so. The Globe theatre was there, 
of which Shakspeare himself was a proprietor, 
and for which he wrote some of his plays. 
Globe-lane, in which it stood, is still extant, 
we believe, under that name. It is probable 

Leicester, and the other particulars of him mentioned 
above. The Earl was buried at Coventry, his Countess 
most probably in the same tomb. 



THE INDICATOR. 



that he lived near it : it is certain that he 
must have been much there. It is also certain, 
that on the Borough side of the river, then 
and still called the Bank-side, in the same 
lodging, having the same wardrobe, and some 
say, with other participations more remarkable, 
lived Beaumont and Fletcher. In the Borough 
also, at St. Saviour's, lie Fletcher and Mas- 
singer, in one grave ; in the same church, 
under a monument and effigy, lies Chaucer's 
contemporary, Gower ; and from an inn in the 
Borough, the existence of which is still boasted, 
and the site pointed out by a picture and in- 
scription, Chaucer sets out his pilgrims and 
himself on their famous road to Canterbury. 

To return over the water, who would expect 
anything poetical from East Smithfield ? Yet 
there was born the most poetical even of 
poets, Spenser. Pope was born within the 
sound of Bow-bell, in a street no less anti- 
poetical than Lombard-street. Gray was born 
in Cornhill ; and Milton in Bread-street, 
Cheapside. The presence of the same great 
poet and patriot has given happy memories to 
many parts of the metropolis. He lived in St. 
Bride's Church-yard, Fleet-street ; in Alders- 
gate-street, in Jewin-street, in Barbican, in 
Bartholomew-close ; in Holborn, looking back 
to Lincoln's-inn-Fields ; in Holborn, near Red 
Lion-square ; in Scotland-yard ; in a house 
looking to St. James's Park, now belonging to 
an eminent writer on legislation,* and lately 
occupied by a celebrated critic and metaphy- 
sician ;f and he died in the Artillery- walk, 
Bunhill-fields ; and was buried in St. Giles's, 
Cripplegate. 

Ben Jonson, who was born in " Hartshorn e- 
lane, near Charing-cross," was at one thne 
" master" of a theatre in Barbican. He appears 
also to have visited a tavern called the Sun 
and Moon, in Aldersgate-street ; and is known 
to have frequented, with Beaumont and others, 
the famous one called the Mermaid, which was 
in Cornhill. Beaumont, writing to him from 
the country, in an epistle full of jovial wit, 



The sun, which doth the greatest comfort hring 
To absent friends, because the self-same thing 
They know they see, however absent, is 
Here our best haymaker : forgive me this : 
It is our country style : — In this warm shine 
I lie, and dream of your full Mermaid wine. 



Methinks the little wit I had, is lost, 

Since I saw you ; for wit is like a rest 

Held up at tennis, which men do the best 

With the best gamesters. What things have we seen 

Done at the Mermaid ! Hard words that have been 

So nimble, and 60 full of subtle flame, 

As if that every one from whom they came 

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 

And had resolved to live a fool the rest 

Of his dull life. Then, when there hath been thrown 

Wit, able enough to justify the town 



* Mr. Bentham. 



j Mr. Hazlitt. 



For three days past,— -wit, that might warrant be 

For the whole city to talk foolishly 

Till that were cancelled, and when that was gone, 

We left an air behind us, which alone 

Was able to make the two next companies 

Right witty ;— though but downright fools, mere wise. 

The other celebrated resort of the great 
wits of that time, was the Devil tavern, in 
Fleet-street, close to Temple-bar. Ben Jonson 
lived also in Bartholomew-close, where Milton 
afterwards lived. It is in the passage from 
the cloisters of Christ's Hospital into St. Bar- 
tholomew's. Aubrey gives it as a common 
opinion, that at the time when Jonson's father- 
in-law made him help him in his business of 
bricklayer, he worked with his own hands 
upon the Lincoln's-inn garden wall, which 
looks towards Chancery-lane, and which seems 
old enough to have some of his illustrious 
brick and mortar remaining. 

Under the cloisters in Christ's Hospital 
(which stands in the heart of the city unknown 
to most persons, like a house kept invisible 
for young and learned eyes)* lie buried a 
multitude of persons of all ranks ; for it was 
once a monastery of Grey Friars. Among 
them is John of Bourbon, one of the prisoners 
taken at the battle of Agincourt. Here also 
lies Thomas Burdett, ancestor of the present 
Sir Francis, who was put to death in the reign 
of Edward the Fourth, for wishing the horns 
of a favourite white stag which the king had 
killed, in the body of the person who advised 
him to do it. And here too (a sufficing con- 
trast) lies Isabella, wife of Edward the Second,— 

She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, 
Who tore the bowels of her mangled mate. — Gray. 

Her " mate's " heart was buried with her, and 
placed upon her bosom ! a thing that looks 
like the fantastic incoherence of a dream. It 
is well we did not know of her presence when 
at school ; otherwise, after reading one of 
Shakspeare's tragedies, we should have run 
twice as fast round the cloisters at night-time 
as we used. Camden, " the nourrice of an- 
tiquitie," received part of his education in this 
school ; and here also, not to mention a variety 
of others, knoAvn in the literary world, were 
bred two of the best and most deep-spirited 
writers of the present day,f whose visits to 
the cloisters we well remember. 

In a palace on the site of Hatton-Garden, 
died John of Gaunt. Brook-house, at the 
corner of the street of that name in Holborn, 
was the residence of the celebrated Sir Fulke 
Greville, Lord Brooke, the " friend of Sir 
Philip Sidney." In the same street, died, by 
a voluntary death of poison, that extraordinary 
person, Thomas Chatterton, — 

The sleepless boy, who perished in his pride. 

Wordsworth. 

* It has since been unveiled, by an opening in Newgate- 
street, t Coleridge and Lamb. 



MEMORIES OF THE METROPOLIS. 



He was buried in the grave-yard of the work- 
house in Shoe-lane ; — a circumstance, at which 
one can hardly help feeling a movement of in- 
dignation. Yet what could beadles and parish 
officers know about such a being? No more 
than Horace Walpole. In Gray's-inn lived, and 
in Gray's-inn garden meditated, Lord Bacon. 
In Southampton-row, Holborn, Cowper was fel- 
low-clerk to an attorney with the future Lord 
Chancellor Thurlow. At one of the Fleet-street 
corners of Chancery-lane, Cowley, we believe, 
was born. In Salisbury-court, Fleet-street, was 
the house of Thomas Sackville, first Earl of 
Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, and one of 
the authors of the first regular English tragedy. 
On the demolition of this house, part of the 
ground was occupied by the celebrated theatre 
built after the Restoration, at which Betterton 
performed, and of which Sir William Davenant 
was manager. Lastly, here was the house 
and printing-office of Richardson. In Bolt- 
court, not far distant, lived Dr. Johnson, who 
resided also some time in the Temple. A list 
of his numerous other residences is to be found 
in Bos well.* Congreve died in Surrey-street, 
in the Strand, at his own house. At the corner 
of Beaufort-buildings, was Lilly's, the per- 
fumer, at whose house the Toiler was published. 
In Maiden-lane, Co vent-garden, Voltaire lodged 
while in London, at the sign of the White 
Peruke. Tavistock-street was then, we believe, 
the Bond-street of the fashionable world ; as 
Bow-street was before. The change of Bow- 
street from fashion to the police, with the 
theatre still in attendance, reminds one of the 
spirit of the Beggar's Opera. Button's Coffee- 
house, the resort of the wits of Queen Anne's 
time, was in Russell-street, near where the 
Hummums now stand ; and in the same street, 
at the south-west corner of Bow-street, was the 
tavern where Dryden held regal possession of 
the arm-chair. The whole of Covent-garden 
is classic ground, from its association with the 
dramatic and other wits of the times of Dryden 
and Pope. Butler lived, perhaps died, in 
Rose-street, and was buried in Covent-garden 
churchyard ; where Peter Pindar the other 
day followed him. In Leicester-square, on 
the site of Miss Linwood's exhibition and 
other houses, was the town-mansion of the 
Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, the family of Sir 
Philip and Algernon Sydney. In the same 
square lived Sir Joshua Reynolds and Hogarth. 
Dryden lived and died in Gerrard-street, in a 
house which looked backwards into the garden 
of Leicester-house. Newton lived in St. Mar- 
tin's-street, on the south side of the square. 
Steele lived in Bury-street, St. James's : he 
furnishes an illustrious precedent for the 
loungers in St. James's-street, where a scandal- 

* The Temple must have had many eminent inmates. 
Among them it is believed was Chaucer, who is also said, 
upon the strength of an old record, to have been fined two 
shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet-street. 



monger of those times delighted to detect 
Isaac Bickerstaff in 'the person of Captain 
Steele, idling before the coffee-houses, and 
jerking his leg and stick alternately against 
the pavement. We have mentioned the birth 
of Ben Jonson near Charing-cross. Spenser 
died at an inn, where he put up on his arrival 
from Ireland, in King-street, Westminster, — 
the same which runs at the back of Parliament- 
street to the Abbey. Sir Thomas More lived 
at Chelsea. Addison lived and died in Hoi land- 
house, Kensington, now the residence of the 
accomplished nobleman who takes his title 
from it. In Brook-street, Grosvenor-square, 
lived Handel ; and in Bentinck-street, Man- 
chester-square, Gibbon. We have omitted to 
mention that De Foe kept a hosier's shop in 
Cornhill ; and that on the site of the present 
Southampton-buildings, Chau eery-lane, stood 
the mansion of the Wriothesleys, Earls of 
Southampton, one of whom was the celebrated 
friend of Shakspeare. But what have we not 
omitted also ? No less an illustrious head than 
the Boar's, in Eastcheap, — the Boar's-head 
tavern, the scene of Falstaff's revels. We 
believe the place is still marked out by the 
sign.* But who knows not Eastcheap and the 
Boar's-head ? Have we not all been there, 
time out of mind ? And is it not a more real 
as well as notorious thing to us than the London 
tavern, or the Crown and Anchor, or the 
Hummums, or White's, or What's-his-name's, 
or any other of your contemporary and fleeting 
taps? 

But a line or two, a single sentence in an 
author of former times, will often give a value 
to the commonest object. It not only gives 
us. a sense of its duration, but we seem to be 
looking at it in company with its old observer ; 
and we are reminded, at the same time, of all 
that was agreeable in him. We never saw, 
for instance, the gilt ball at the top of the 
College of Physicians, + without thinking of 
that pleasant mention of it in Garth's Dispen- 
sary, and of all the wit and generosity of that 
amiable man : — 

Not far from that most celebrated place & 
Where angry Justice shows her awful face, 
Where little villains must submit to fate, 
That great ones may enjoy the world in state ; 
There stands a dome, majestic to the sight,. 
And sumptuous arches bear its oval height ; 
A golden globe, placed high with artful skill. 
Seems, to the distant sight, a gilded pill. 

Gay, in describing the inconvenience of the 
late narrow part of the Strand, by St. Clement's, 
took away a portion of its unpleasantness to 
the next generation, by associating his memory 
with the objects in it. We did not miss without 
regret even the " combs " that hung " dangling 



* It has lately disappeared, in the alterations occasioned 
by the new London Bridge, 
t In Warwick-lane, now a manufactory 
+ The Old Bailey. 



THE INDICATOR. 



in your face " at a shop which he describes, 
and which was standing till the late improve- 
ments took place. The rest of the picture is 
still alive. (Trivia, b. in.) 

Where the fair columns of St. Clement stand, 
Whose straitened bounds encroach upon the Strand ; 
Where the low pent-house bows the walker's head, 
And the rough pavement wounds the yielding tread ; 
Where not a post protects the narrow space, 
And strung in twines, combs dangle in thy face ; 
Summon at once thy courage, rouse thy care ; 
Stand firiji, look back, be resolute, beware ! 
Forth issuing from steep lanes, the colliers' steeds 
Drag the black load ; another cart succeeds ; 
Team follows team, crowds heaped on crowds appear, 
And wait impatient till the road grow clear. 

There is a touch in the Winter Picture in 
the same poem, which everybody will recog- 
nise : — 

At White's the harnessed chairman idly stands* 
And swings around his waist his tingling hands. . 

The bewildered passenger in the Seven Dials 
is compared to Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. 
And thus we come round to the point at which 



Before we rest our wings, however, we must 
take another dart over the city, as far as Strat- 
ford at Bow, where, with all due tenderness 
for boarding-school French, a joke of Chaucer's 
has existed \ as a piece of local humour for 
nfearly* four hundred and fifty years . Speaking 
• o$ the Prkfress, who makes such a delicate 
•figure among his Canterbury Pilgrims, he tells 
us, in the list of her accomplishments, that — 

French she spake full faire and featously ; 
adding with great gravity — 

After the school of Stratforde atte Bowe ; 
For French of Paris was to her unknowe. 



VII.— ADVICE TO THE MELANCHOLY. 

If you are melancholy for the first time, you 
will find upon a little inquiry, that others have 
been melancholy many times, and yet are 
cheerful now. If you have been melancholy 
many times, recollect that you have got over 
all those times ; and try if you cannot find out 
means of getting over them better. 

Do not imagine that mind alone is concerned 
in your bad spirits. The body has a great 
deal to do with these matters. The mind may 
undoubtedly affect the body ; but the body 
also affects the mind. There is a re-action 
between them ; and by lessening it on either 
side, you diminish .the pain on both. 

If you are melancholy, and know not why, 
be assured it must arise entirely from some 
physical weakness ; and do your best to 
strengthen yourself. The blood of a melan- 
choly man is thick and slow ; the blood of a 



lively man is clear and quick. Endeavour 
therefore to put your blood in motion. Ex- 
ercise is the best way to do it ; but you may 
also help yourself, in moderation, with wine, or 
other excitements. Only you must take care 
so to proportion the use of any artificial 
stimulus, that it may not render the blood 
languid by over-exciting it at first ; and that 
you may be able to keep up, by the natural 
stimulus only, the help you have given your- 
self by the artificial. 

Regard the bad weather as somebody has 
advised us to handle the nettle. In proportion 
as you are delicate with it, it will make you 
feel ; but 

Grasp it like a man of mettle, 

And the rogue obeys you well. 

Do not theless,however,on that account, take 
all reasonable precaution and arms against it, 
— your boots, &c. against wet feet, and your 
great-coat or umbrella against the rain. It is 
timidity and flight, which are to be deprecated, 
not proper armour for the battle. The first 
will lay you open to defeat, on the least attack. 
A proper use of the latter will only keep you 
strong for it. Plato had such a high opinion 
of exercise, that he said it was a cure even for 
a wounded conscience. Nor is this opinion a 
dangerous one. For there is no system, even 
of superstition, however severe or cruel in 
other matters, that does not allow a wounded 
conscience to be curable by some means. 
Nature will work out its rights and its kindness 
some way or other, through the worst sophis- 
tications ; and this is one of the instances in 
which she seems to raise herself above all con- 
tingencies. The conscience may have been 
wounded by artificial or by real guilt ; but 
then she will tell it in those extremities, that 
even the real guilt may have been produced 
by circumstances. It is her kindness alone, 
which nothing can pull down from its pre- 
dominance. 

See fair play between cares and pastimes. 
Diminish your artificial wants as much as pos- 
sible, whether you are rich or poor ; for the 
rich man's, increasing by indulgence, are apt 
to outweigh even the abundance of his means ; 
and the poor man's diminution of them renders 
his means the greater. On the other hand, 
increase all your natural and healthy enjoy- 
ments. Cultivate your afternoon fire-side, the 
society of your friends, the company of agree- 
able children, music, theatres, amusing books, 
an urbane and generous gallantry. He who 
thinks any innocent pastime foolish, has either 
to grow wiser or is past the ability to do so. 
, In the one case, his notion of being childish is 
itself a childish notion. In the other, his 
importance is of so feeble and hollow a cast, 
that it dare not move for fear of tumbling to 
pieces. 

A friend of ours, who knows as well as any 
man how to unite industry with enjoyment, 



CHARLES BRANDON, AND MARY QUEEN OF FRANCE. 



has set an excellent example to those who can 
afford the leisure, by taking two Sabbaths e very- 
week instead of one, — not Methodistical 
Sabbaths, but days of rest which pay true 
homage to the Supreme Being by enjoying his 
creation. 

One of the best pieces of advice for an ailing 
spirit is to go to no sudden extremes — to adopt 
no great and extreme changes in diet or other 
habits. They may make a man look very 
great and philosophic to his own mind ; but 
they are not fit for a being, to whom custom 
has been truly said to be a second nature. Dr. 
Cheyne may tell us that a drowning man cannot 
too quickly get himself out of the water ; but 
the analogy is not good. If the water has 
become a second habit, he might almost as well 
say that a fish could not get too quickly out 
of it. 

Upon this point, Bacon says that we should 
discontinue what we think hurtful by little and 
little. And he quotes with admiration the 
advice of Celsus : — that " a man do vary and 
interchange contraries, but rather with an in- 
clination to the more benign extreme." " Use 
fasting," he says, " and full eating, but rather 
full eating ; wa'tching and sleep, but rather 
sleep ; sitting and exercise, but rather exercise, 
and the like ; so shall nature be cherished, and 
yet taught masteries." 

We cannot do better than conclude with 
one or two other passages out of the same 
Essay, full of his usual calm wisdom. " If you 
fly physic in health altogether, it will be too 
strange for your body when you need it." (He 
means that a general state of health should 
not make us over-confident and contemptuous 
of physic ; but that we should use it mode- 
rately if required, that it may not be too 
strange to us when required most.) " If you 
make it too familiar, it will have no extraordi- 
nary effect when sickness cometh. I commend 
rather some diet for certain seasons, than 
frequent use of physic, except it be grown 
into a custom ; for those diets alter the body 
more, and trouble it less." 

"As for the passions and studies of the 
mind," says he, "avoid envy, anxious fears, 
anger fretting inwards, subtle and knotty in- 
quisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, 
sadness not communicated" (for as he says 
finely, somewhere else, they who keep their 
griefs to themselves, are " cannibals of their 
own hearts "). " Entertain hopes ; mirth rather 
than joy ; " (that is to say, cheerfulness rather 
than boisterous merriment ;) " variety of de- 
lights rather than surfeit of them ; wonder 
and admiration, and therefore novelties ; 
studies that fill the mind with splendid and 
illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and 
contemplations of nature." 



VIII.— CHARLES BRANDON, AND MARY 
QUEEN OF FRANCE. 

The fortune of Charles Brandon was re- 
markable. He was an honest man, yet the 
favourite of a despot. He was brave, hand- 
some, accomplished, possessed even delicacy 
of sentiment ; yet he retained the despot's 
favour to the last. He even had the perilous 
honour of being beloved by his master's sister, 
without having the least claim to it by birth ; 
and yet instead of its destroying them both, he 
was allowed to be her husband. 

Charles Brandon was the son of Sir William 
Brandon, whose skull was cleaved at Bosworth 
by Richard the Third, while bearing the 
standard of the Duke of Richmond. Richard 
dashed at the standard, and appears to have 
been thrown from his horse by Sir William, 
whose strength and courage however could not 
save him from the angry desperation of the 
king. 

But Time, whose wheeles with various motion runne, 
Repayes this service fully to his sonne, 
Who marries Richmond's daughter, born betweene 
Two royal parents, and endowed a queene. 

Sir John Beaumont's Bosworth Field. 

The father's fate must have had its effect in 
securing the fortunes of the son. Young 
Brandon grew up with Henry the Seventh's 
children, and was the playmate of his future 
king and bride. The prince, as he increased in 
years, seems to have carried the idea of Bran- 
don with him like that of a second self ; and 
the princess, whose affection was not hindered 
from becoming personal by anything sisterly, 
nor on the other hand allowed to waste itself 
in . too equal a familiarity, may have felt a 
double impulse given to it by the improbability 
of her ever being suffered to become his wife. 
Royal females in most countries have certainly 
none of the advantages of their rank, whatever 
the males may have. Mary was destined to 
taste the usual bitterness of their lot ; but 
she was repaid. At the conclusion of the war 
with France, she was married to the old king 
Louis the Twelfth, who witnessed from a couch 
the exploits of her future husband at the 
tournaments. The doings of Charles Brandon 
that time were long remembered. The love 
between him and the young queen was sus- 
pected by the French court ; and he had just 
seen her enter Paris in the midst of a gorgeous 
procession, like Aurora come to marry Titho- 
nus. Brandon dealt his chivalry about him 
accordingly with such irresistible vigour, that 
the dauphin, in a fit of jealousy, secretly in- 
troduced into the contest a huge German, who 
was thought to be of a strength incomparable. 
But Brandon grappled with him, and with 
seeming disdain and detection so pummelled 
him about the head with the hilt of his sword, 
that the blood burst through the vizor. Ima- 
gine the feelings of the queen, when he came 



10 



THE INDICATOR. 



and made her an offering of the German's 
shield ! Drayton, in his Heroical Epistles, we 
know not on what authority, tells us, that on 
one occasion during the combats, perhaps this 
particular one, she could not help crying out, 
" Hurt not my sweet Charles," or words to 
that effect. He then pleasantly represents her 
as doing away suspicion by falling to commen- 
dations of the dauphin, and affecting not to 
know who the conquering knight was ; — an 
ignorance not very probable ; but the knights 
sometimes disguised themselves purposely. 

The old king did not long survive his fes- 
tivities. He died in less than three months, 
on the first day of the year 1515 ; and Brandon, 
who had been created Duke of Suffolk the year 
before, re-appeared at the French court, with 
letters of condolence, and more persuasive 
looks. The royal widow was young, beautiful, 
and rich : and it was likely that her hand 
would be sought by many princely lovers ; but 
she was now resolved to reward herself for her 
sacrifice, and in less than two months she 
privately married her first love. The queen, 
says a homely but not mean poet (Warner, in 
his Albion's England) thought that to cast too 
many doubts 

Were oft to erre no lesse 
Than to be rash : and thus no doubt 

The gentle queen did guesse, 
That seeing this or that, at first 

Or last, had likelyhood, 
A man so much a manly man 

Were dastardly withstood. 
Then kisses revelled on their lips, 

To either's equal good. 

Henry showed great anger at first, real or 
pretended ; but he had not then been pampered 
into unbearable self-will by a long reign of 
tyranny. He forgave his sister and friend ; 
and they were publicly wedded at Greenwich 
on the 13th of May. 

It was during the festivities on this occasion 
(at least we believe so, for we have not the 
chivalrous Lord Herbert's Life of Henry the 
Eighth by us, which is most probably the au- 
thority for the story ; and being a good thing, 
it is omitted, as usual, by the historians) that 
Charles Brandon gave a proof of the fineness 
of his nature, equally just towards himself, 
and conciliating towards the jealous. He ap- 
peared, at a tournament, on a saddle-cloth, 
made half of frize and half of cloth-of-gold, 
and with a motto on each half. One of the 
mottos ran thus : — 

Cloth of frize, be not too bold, 

Though thou art match'd with cloth of gold. 

The other :— 

Cloth of gold, do not despise, 

Though thou art matched with cloth of frize. 

It is this beautiful piece of sentiment which 
puts a heart into his history, and makes it 
worthy remembering. 



IX.— ON THE HOUSEHOLD GODS OF 
THE ANCIENTS. 

The Ancients had three kinds of Household 
Gods, — the Daimon (Daemon) or Genius, the 
Penates, and the Lares. The first was sup- 
posed to be a spirit allotted to every man 
from his birth, some say with a companion -> 
and that one of them was a suggester of good 
thoughts, and the other of evil. It seems, 
however, that the Genius was a personification 
of the conscience, or rather of the prevailing 
impulses of the mind, or the other self of a 
man ; and it was in this sense most likely that 
Socrates condescended to speak of his well- 
known Daemon, Genius, or Familiar Spirit, 
who, as he was a good man, always advised 
him to a good end. The Genius was thought 
to paint ideas upon the mind in as lively a 
manner as if in a looking-glass ; upon which 
we chose which of them to adopt. Spenser, 
a deeply-learned as well as imaginative poet, 
describes it in one of his most comprehensive 
though not most poetical stanzas, as 

- — That celestial Powre, to whom the care 
Of life, and generation of all 
That lives, pertaine in charge particulare ; 
Who wondrous things concerning our welfare, 
And straunge phantomes doth lett us ofte foresee, 
And ofte of secret ills bids us beware : 
That is our Selfe, whom though we do not see, 
Yet each doth in himselfe it well perceive to bee. 

Therefore a God him sage antiquity 

Did wisely make.— Faerie Queene, book ii. st. 47. 

Of the belief in an Evil Genius, a celebrated 
example is furnished in Plutarch's account of 
Brutus's vision, of which Shakspeare has 
given so fine a version (Julius Ccesar, Act 4, 
Sc. 3). Beliefs of this kind seem traceable 
from one superstition to another, and in some 
instances are immediately so. But fear, and 
ignorance, and even the humility of know- 
ledge, are at hand to furnish them, where pre- 
cedent is wanting. There is no doubt, how- 
ever, that the Romans, who copied and in 
general vulgarized the Greek mythology, took 
their Genius from the Greek Daimon : and 
as the Greek word has survived and taken 
shape in the common word Daemon, which by 
scornful reference to the Heathen religion, 
came at last to signify a Devil, so the Latin 
word Genius, not having been used by the 
translators of the Greek Testament, has sur- 
vived with a better meaning, and is employed 
to express our most genial and intellectual 
faculties. Such and such a man is said to in- 
dulge his genius : — he has a genius for this 
and that art :— he has a noble genius, a fine 
genius, an original and peculiar genius. And 
as the Romans, from attributing a genius to 
every man at his birth, came to attribute one 
to places and to soils, and other more com- 
prehensive peculiarities, so we have adopted 



THE HOUSEHOLD GODS OF THE ANCIENTS. 



11 



the same use of the term into our poetical 
phraseology. "We speak also of the genius 
or idiomatic peculiarity of a language. One of 
the most curious and edifying uses of the 
word Genius took place in the English trans- 
lation of the French Arabian Nights, which 
speaks of our old friends the Genie and the 
Genies. This is nothing more than the French 
word retained from the original translator, 
who applied the Roman word Genius to the 
Arabian Dive or Elf. 

One of the stories with which Pausanias has 
enlivened his description of Greece, is relative 
to a Genius. He says, that one of the compa- 
nions of Ulysses having been killed by the 
people of Temesa, they were fated to sacrifice 
a beautiful virgin every year to his manes. 
They were about to immolate one as usual, 
when Euthymus, a conqueror in the Olympic 
Games, touched with pity at her fate and ad- 
miration of her beauty, fell in love with her, 
and resolved to try if he could not put an end 
to so terrible a custom. He accordingly got 
permission from the state to marry her, pro- 
vided he could rescue her from her dreadful 
expectant. He armed himself, waited in the 
temple, and the genius appeared. It was said 
to have been of an appalling presence. Its 
shape was every way formidable, its colour of 
an intense black, and it was girded about with 
a wolf-skin. But Euthymus fought and con- 
quered it ; upon which it fled madly, not only 
beyond the walls, but the utmost bounds of 
Temesa, and rushed into the sea. 

The Penates were Gods of the house and 
family. Collectively speaking, they also pre- 
sided over cities, public roads, and at last over 
all places with which men were conversant. 
Their chief government however was sup- 
posed to be over the most inner and secret 
part of the house, and the subsistence and 
welfare of its inmates. They were chosen 
at will out of the number of the gods, as the 
Roman in modern times chose his favourite 
saint. In fact they were only the higher gods 
themselves, descending into a kind of house- 
hold familiarity. They were the personifica- 
tion of a particular Providence. The most 
striking mention of the Penates which we 
can call to mind is in one of Virgil's most 
poetical passages. It is where they appear 
to iEneas, to warn him from Crete, and an- 
nounce his destined empire in Italy. (Lib. III. 
v. 147.) 

Nox erat, et terris animalia somnus habebat : 
Effigies sacra? divum, Phrygiique Penates, 
Quos mecum a Troja, mediisque ex ignibus urbia 
Extulerarn, visi ante oculos adstare jacentis 
In somnis, multo manifesti lumine, qua se 
Plena per insertas fundebat luna fenestras. 

'Twas night ; and sleep was on all living things. 
I lay, and saw before my very eyes 
Dread shapes of gods, and Phrygian deities, 
The great Penates ; whom with reverent joy 
I bore from out the heart of burning Troy. 



Plainly I saw them, standing in the light 

Which the moon poured into the room that night. 

And again, after they had addressed him — 

Nee sopor illud erat ; sed coram agnoscere vultus, 
Velatasque comas, prassentiaque ora videbar : 
Tumjgelidus toto manabat corpore sudor. 

It was no dream : I saw them face to face, 
Their hooded hair ; and felt them so before 
My being, that I burst at every pore. 

The Lares, or Lars, were the lesser and 
most familiar Household Gods, and though their 
offices were afterwards extended a good deal, in 
the same way as those of the Penates, with whom 
they are often confounded, their principal 
sphere was the fire-place. This was in the 
middle of the room ; and the statues of the 
Lares generally stood about it in little niches. 
They are said to have been in the shape of 
monkeys ; more likely mannikins, or rude 
little human images. Some were made of wax, 
some of stone, and others doubtless of any ma- 
terial for sculpture. They were represented 
with good-natured grinning countenances, were 
clothed in skins, and had little dogs at their 
feet. Some writers make them the offspring 
of the goddess Mania, who presided over the 
spirits of the dead ; and suppose that origi- 
nally they were the same as those spirits ; 
which is a very probable as well as agreeable 
superstition, the old nations of Italy having 
been accustomed to bury their dead in their 
houses. Upon this supposition, the good or 
benevolent spirits were called Familiar Lares, 
and the evil or malignant ones Larvss and 
Lemures. Thus Milton, in his awful Hymn 
on the Nativity : — 

In consecrated earth, 

And on the holy hearth, 

The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint. 

In urns and altars round, 

A drear and dying sound 

Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint ; 

And the chill marble seems to sweat, 

While each Peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat. 

But Ovid tells a story of a gossiping nymph 
Lara, who having told Juno of her husband's 
amour with Juturna, was " sent to Hell " by 
him, and courted by Mercury on the road ; 
the consequence of which was the birth of the 
Lares. This seems to have a natural reference 
enough to the gossiping over fire-places. 

It is impossible not to be struck with the 
resemblance between these lesser Household 
Gods and some of the offices of our old 
English elves and fairies. Dacier, in a note 
upon Horace (Lib. I., Od. 12) informs us, that 
in some parts of Languedoc, in his time, the 
fire-place was still called the Lar ; and that 
the name was also given to houses. 

Herrick, a poet of the Anacreontic order 
in the time of Elizabeth, who was visited, 
perhaps more than any other, except Spenser, 
with a sense of the pleasantest parts of the 



12 



THE INDICATOR. 



ancient mythology, has written some of his 
lively little odesupon the Lares. We have not 
them by us at this moment, but we remember 
one beginning, — 

It was, and still my care is 
To worship you, the Lares. 

We take the opportunity of the Lar's being 
mentioned in it, to indulge ourselves in a little 
poem of Martial's, very charming for its sim- 
plicity. It is an Epitaph on a child of the 
name of Erotion. 

Hie festinata requiescit Erotion umbra, 
Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems. 

Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli, 
Manibus exiguis annua justa dato. 

Sic Lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus 
Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua. 

THE EPITAPH OF EROTION. 

Underneath this greedy stone 

Lies little sweet Erotion ; 

Whom the fates, with hearts as cold, 

Nipt away at six years old. 

Thou, whoever thou may'st be, 

That hast this small field after me, 

Let the yearly rites be paid 

To her little slender shade ; 

So shall no disease or jar 

Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar ; 

But this tomb here be alone, 

The only melancholy stone. 



X.— SOCIAL GENEALOGY. 

It is a curious and pleasant thing to con- 
sider, that a link of personal acquaintance 
can be traced up from the authors of our own 
times to those of Shakspeare, and to Shak- 
speare himself. Ovid, in recording his inti- 
macy with Propertius and Horace, regrets that 
he had only seen Virgil. (Trist. Lib. IV., v. 51.) 
But still he thinks the sight of him worth 
remembering. And Pope, when a child, pre- 
vailed on some friends to take him to a coffee- 
house which Dryden frequented, merely to 
look at him ; which he did, with great satis- 
faction. Now such of us as have shaken 
hands with a living poet, might be able to 
reckon up a series of connecting shakes, to the 
very hand that wrote of Hamlet, and of Fal- 
staff, and of Desdemona. 

With some living poets, it is certain. There 
is Thomas Moore, for instance, who knew 
Sheridan. Sheridan knew Johnson, who was 
the friend of Savage, who knew Steele, who 
knew Pope. Pope was intimate with Con- 
greve, and Congreve with Dryden. Dryden is 
said to have visited Milton. Milton is said to 
have known Davenant ; and to have been saved 
by him from the revenge of the restored court, 
in return for having saved Davenant from the 
revenge of the Commonwealth. But if the 
link between Dryden and Milton, and Milton 
and Davenant, is somewhat apocryphal, or 
rather dependent on tradition (for Richardson 



the painter tells us the story from Pope, who 
had it from Betterton the actor, one of Dave- 
nant's company), it may be carried at once 
from Dryden to Davenant, with whom he was 
unquestionably intimate. Davenant then knew 
Hobbes, who knew Bacon, who knew Ben 
Jonson, who was intimate with Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Chapman, Donne, Drayton, Camden, 
Selden, Clarendon, Sydney, Raleigh, and per- 
haps all the great men of Elizabeth's and 
James's time, the greatest of them all undoubt- 
edly. Thus have we a link of " beamy hands" 
from our own times up to Shakspeare. 

In this friendly genealogy we have omitted 
the numerous side-branches or common friend- 
ships. It may be mentioned, however, in 
order not to omit Spenser, that Davenant re- 
sided some time in the family of Lord Brooke, 
the friend of Sir Philip Sidney. Spenser's 
intimacy with Sidney is mentioned by himself 
in a letter, still extant, to Gabriel Harvey. 

We will now give the authorities for our in- 
tellectual pedigree. Sheridan is mentioned in 
Boswell as being admitted to the celebrated 
club of which Johnson, Goldsmith, and others 
were members. He had just written the 
School for Scandal, which made him the more 
welcome. Of Johnson's friendship with Savage 
(we cannot help beginning the sentence with 
his favourite leading preposition), the well- 
known Life is an interesting record. It is said 
that in the commencement of their friendship, 
they sometimes wandered together about 
London for want of a lodging — more likely 
for Savage's want of it, and Johnson's fear of 
offending him by offering a share of his own. 
But we do not remember how this circumstance 
is related by Boswell. 

Savage's intimacy with Steele is recorded in 
a pleasant anecdote, which he told Johnson. 
Sir Richard once desired him, * with an air of 
the utmost importance," says his biographer, 
"to come very early to his house the next 
morning. Mr. Savage came as he had pro- 
mised, found the chariot at the door, and Sir 
Richard waiting for him and ready to go out. 
What was intended, and whither they were to 
go, Savage could not conjecture, and was not 
willing to inquire, but immediately seated 
himself with Sir Richard. The coachman was 
ordered to drive, and they hurried with the 
utmost expedition to Hyde-park Corner, where 
they stopped at a petty tavern, and retired to 
a private room. Sir Richard then informed 
him that he intended to publish a pamphlet, 
and that he had desired him to come thither 
that he might write for him. They soon sat 
down to the work. Sir Richard dictated, and 
Savage wrote, till the dinner that had been 
ordered was put upon the table. Savage was 
surprised at the meanness of the entertain- 
ment, and after some hesitation, ventured to 
ask for wine, which Sir Richard, not without 
reluctance, ordered to be brought. They then 



ANGLING. 



13 



finished their dinner, and proceeded in their 
pamphlet, which they concluded in the after- 
noon. 

"Mr. Savage then imagined that his task 
was over, and expected that Sir Richard would 
call for the reckoning, and return home ; but 
his expectations deceived him, for Sir Richard 
told him that he was without money, and that 
the pamphlet must be sold before the dinner 
could be paid for, and Savage was therefore 
obliged to go and offer their new production for 
sale for two guineas, which with some difficulty 
he obtained. Sir Richard then returned home, 
having retired that day only to avoid his cre- 
ditors, and composed the pamphlet only to 
discharge his reckoning." 

Steele's acquaintance with Pope, who wrote 
some papers for his Guardian, appears in the 
letters and other works of the wits of that 
time . Johnson supposes that it was his friendly 
interference, which attempted to bring Pope 
and Addison together after a jealous separa- 
tion. Pope's friendship with Congreve appears 
also in his letters. He also dedicated the Iliad 
to Congreve, over the heads of peers and 
patrons. The dramatist, whose conversation 
most likely partook of the elegance and wit 
of his writings, and whose manners appear to 
have rendered him a universal favourite, had 
the honour, in his youth, of attracting the 
respect and regard of Dry den. He was pub- 
licly hailed by him as his successor, and affec- 
tionately bequeathed the care of his laurels. 
Dryden did not know who had been looking at 
him in the coffee-house. 

Already I am worn with cares and age, 
And just abandoning th' ungrateful stage ; 
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense, 
I live a rent-charge on his providence. 
But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn, 
Whom I foresee to better fortune born, 
Be kind to my remains ; and O defend, 
Against your judgment, your departed friend ! 
Let not th* insulting foe my fame pursue, 
But shade those laurels which descend to you. 

Congreve did so, with great tenderness. 

Dryden is reported to have asked Milton's 
permission to turn his Paradise Lost into a 
rhyming tragedy, which he called the State of 
Innocence, or the Fall of Man; a work, such as 
might be expected from such a mode of alter- 
ation. The venerable poet is said to have 
answered, " Ay, young man, you may tag 
my verses, if you will." Be the connexion, 
however, of Dryden with Milton, or of Milton 
with Davenant, as it may, Dryden wrote the 
alteration of Shakspeare's Tempest, as it is now 
perpetrated, in conjunction with Davenant. 
They were great hands, but they should not 
have touched the pure grandeur of Shakspeare. 
The intimacy of Davenant with Hobbes is to 
be seen by their correspondence prefixed to 
Gondibert. Hobbes was at one time secretary 
to Lord Bacon, a singularly illustrious instance 
of servant and master. Bacon also had Ben 



Jonson for a retainer in a similar capacity ; 
and Jonson's link with the preceding writers 
could be easily supplied through the medium 
of Greville and Sidney, and indeed of many 
others of his contemporaries. Here then we 
arrive at Shakspeare, and feel the electric 
virtue of his hand. Their intimacy, dashed a 
little, perhaps, with jealousy on the part of 
Jonson, but maintained to the last by dint of 
the nobler part of him, and of Shakspeare's 
irresistible fineness of nature, is a thing as 
notorious as their fame. Fuller says : " Many 
were the wit-combates betwixt (Shakspeare) 
and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a 
Spanish great galleon and an English man-of- 
war : master JoDson (like the former) was 
built far higher in learning : solid, but slow in 
his performances. Shakspeare, with the English 
man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sail- 
ing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and 
take advantage of all winds, by the quickness 
of his wit and invention." This is a happy 
simile, with the exception of what is insinuated 
about Jonson's greater solidity. But let Jonson 
show for himself the affection with which he 
regarded one, who did not irritate or trample 
down rivalry, but rose above it like the sun, 
and turned emulation to worship. 

Soul of the age ! 
Th' applause ! delight ! the wonder of out stage ! 
My Shakspeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by 
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 
A little further, to make thee a room ; 
Thou art a monument without a tomb ; 
And art alive still, while thy book doth live, 
And we have wits to read, and praise to give. 
***** 

He was not of an age, but for all time. 



XL—ANGLING. 

The anglers are a race of men who puzzle 
us. "We do not mean for their patience, which 
is laudable, nor for the infinite non-success of 
some of them, which is desirable. Neither do 
we agree with the good old joke attributed to 
Swift, that angling is always to be considered 
as " a stick and a string, with a fly at one end 
and a fool at the other." Nay, if he had books 
with him, and a pleasant day, we can account 
for the joyousness of that prince of punters, 
who, having been seen in the same spot one 
morning and evening, and asked whether he 
had had any success, said No, but in the course 
of the day he had had " a glorious nibble." 

But the anglers boast of the innocence of 
their pastime ; yet it puts fellow-creatures to 
the torture. They pique themselves on their 
meditative faculties ; and yet their only excuse 
is a want of thought. It is this that puzzles 
us. Old Isaac Walton, their patriarch, speak- 
ing of his inquisitorial abstractions on the 
banks of a river, says, 

Here we may 
Think and pray, 



u 



THE INDICATOR. 



Before death 
Stops our breath. 
Other joys 
Are but toys, 
And to be lamented. 

So saying, he "stops the breath" of a trout, 
by plucking him up into an element too thin 
to respire, with a hook and a tortured worm 
in his jaws — 

Other joys 

Are but toys. 

If you ride, walk, or skate, or play at cricket, 
or at rackets, or enjoy a ball or a concert, it is 
" to be lamented." To put pleasure into the 
faces of half a dozen agreeable women, is a 
toy unworthy of the manliness of a worm- 
sticker. But to put a hook into the gills of a 
carp — there you attain the end of a reasonable 
being ; there you show yourself truly a lord of 
the creation. To plant your feet occasionally 
in the mud, is also a pleasing step. So is 
cutting your ancles with weeds and stones — 

Other joys 
Are but toys. 

The book of Isaac Walton upon angling is 
a delightful performance in some respects. It 
smells of the country air, and of the flowers 
in cottage windows. Its pictures of rural 
scenery, its simplicity, its snatches of old songs, 
are all good and refreshing ; and his prodigious 
relish of a dressed fish would not be grudged 
him, if he had killed it a little more decently. 
He really seems to have a respect for a piece 
of salmon ; to approach it, like the grace, with 
his hat off. But what are we to think of a 
man, who in the midst of his tortures of other 
animals, is always valuing himself on his harm- 
lessness ; and who actually follows up one of 
his most complacent passages of this kind, 
with an injunction to impale a certain worm 
twice upon the hook, because it is lively, and 
might get off ! All that can be said of such 
an extraordinary inconsistency is, that having 
been bred up in an opinion of the innocence 
of his amusement, and possessing a healthy 
power of exercising voluntary thoughts (as far 
as he had any), he must have dozed over the 
opposite side of the question, so as to become 
almost, perhaps quite, insensible to it. And 
angling does indeed seem the next thing to 
dreaming. It dispenses with locomotion, 
reconciles contradictions, and renders the 
very countenance null and void. A friend of 
ours, who is an admirer of Walton, was struck, 
just as we were, with the likeness of the old 
angler's face to a fish. It is hard, angular, 
and of no expression. It seems to have been 
"subdued to what it worked in;" to have 
become native to the watery element. One 
might have said to Walton, " Oh flesh, how 
art thou fishified !" He looks like a pike, 
dressed in broadcloth instead of butter. 

The face of his pupil and follower, or, as he 
fondly called himself, son, Charles Cotton, a 



poet and a man of wit, is more good-natured 
and uneasy.* Cotton's pleasures had not been 
confined to fishing. His sympathies indeed 
had been a little superabundant, and left him, 
perhaps, not so great a power of thinking as 
he pleased. Accordingly, we find in his writ- 
ings more symptoms of scrupulousness upon 
the subject, than in those of his father. 

Walton says, that an angler does no hurt 
but to fish ; and this he counts as nothing. 
Cotton argues, that the slaughter of them is 
not to be "repented;" and he says to his 
father (which looks as if the old gentleman 
sometimes thought upon the subject too) 

There whilst behind some bush we wait 

The scaly people to betray, 
We'll pro ve it just, with treacherous bait, 

To make the preying trout our prey. 

This argument, and another about fish's 
being made for " man's pleasure and diet," are 
all that anglers have to say for the innocence 
of their sport. But they are both as rank 
sophistications as can be ; sheer beggings of 
the question. To kill fish outright is a different 
matter. Death is common to all ; and a trout, 
speedily killed by a man, may suffer no worse 
fate than from the jaws of a pike. It is the 
mode, the lingering cat-like cruelty of the 
angler's sport, that renders it unworthy. If 
fish were made to be so treated, then men 
were also made to be racked and throttled by 
inquisitors. Indeed among other advantages 
of angling, Cotton reckons up a tame, fishlike 
acquiescence to whatever the powerful choose 
to inflict. 

We scratch not our pates, 

Nor repine at the rates 

Our superiors impose on our living ; 

But do frankly submit, 

Knowing they have more wit 

In demanding, than we have in giving. 

Whilst quiet we sit, 

We conclude all things fit, 

Acquiescing with hearty submission, &c. 

And this was no pastoral fiction. The anglers 
of those times, whose skill became famous 
from the celebrity of their names, chiefly in 
divinity, were great fallers-in with passive 
obedience. They seemed to think (whatever 
they found it necessary to say now and then 
upon that point) that the great had as much 
right to prey upon men, as the small had upon 
fishes ; only the men luckily had not hooks 
put into their jaws, and the sides of their 
cheeks torn to pieces. The two most famous 
anglers in history are Antony and Cleopatra. 
These extremes of the angling character are 
very edifying. 

We should like to know what these grave 
divines would have said to the heavenly maxim 
of "Do as you would be done by." Let us 
imagine ourselves, for instance, a sort of 

* The reader may see both the portraits in the late 
editions of Walton. 



LUDICROUS EXAGGERATION. 



15 



human fish. Air is but a rarer fluid ; and at 
present, in this November weather, a super- 
natural being who should look down upon us 
from a higher atmosphere, would have some 
reason to regard us as a kind of pedestrian 
carp. Now fancy a Genius fishing for us. 
Fancy him baiting a great hook with pickled 
salmon, and twitching up old Isaac "Walton 
from the banks of the river Lee, with the hook 
through his ear. How he would go up, roaring 
and screaming, and thinking the devil had got 
him ! 

Other joys 

Are but toys. 

We repeat, that if fish were made to be so 
treated, then we were just as much made to 
be racked and suffocated ; and a footpad might 
have argued that old Isaac was made to have 
his pocket picked, and be tumbled into the 
river. There is no end of these idle and 
selfish beggings of the question, which at last 
argue quite as much against us as for us. And 
granting them, for the sake of argument, it is 
still obvious, on the very same ground, that 
men were also made to be taught better. We 
do not say, that all anglers are of a cruel 
nature ; many of them, doubtless, are amiable 
men in other matters. They have only never 
thought perhaps on that side of the question, 
or been accustomed from childhood to blink 
it. But once thinking, their amiableness and 
their practice become incompatible ; and if 
they should wish, on that account, never to 
have thought upon the subject, they would 
only show, that they cared for their own 
exemption from suffering, and not for its 
diminution in general.* 



XII.— LUDICROUS EXAGGERATION. 

Men of wit sometimes like to pamper a joke 
into exaggeration ; into a certain corpulence 
of facetiousness. Their relish of the thing 
makes them wish it as large as possible ; and 
the enjoyment of it is doubled by its becoming 
more visible to the eyes of others. It is for 
this reason that jests in company are some- 
times built up by one hand after another, — 
"threepiled hyperboles," — till the over-done 
Babel topples and tumbles down amidst a 
merry confusion of tongues. 

Falstaff was a great master of this art : he 
loved a joke as large as himself; witness his 
famous account of the men in buckram. Thus 
he tells the Lord Chief Justice, that he had 
lost his voice "with singing of anthems ;" and 
he calls Bardolph's red nose " a perpetual 

* Perhaps the best thing to be said finally about angling 
is. that not being able to determine whether fish feel it 
very sensibly or otherwise, we ought to give them the 
benefit rather than the disadvantage of the doubt, where 
we can help it ; and our feelings the benefit, where we 
cannot. 



triumph, an everlasting bonfire light ;" and 
says it has saved him " a thousand marks in 
links and torches," walking with it "in the 
night, betwixt tavern and tavern." See how 
he goes heightening the account of his recruits 
at every step : — " You would think I had a 
hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately 
come from swine-keeping, from eating draff 
and husks. — A mad fellow met me on the 
way, and told me, I had unloaded all the 
gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies — No eye 
hath seen such scarecrows. — I'll not march 
through Coventry with them, that's flat. — Nay, 
and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, 
as if they had gyves on ; for indeed I had most 
of them out of prison. — There's but a shirt 
and a-half in all my company ;— and the half 
shirt is two napkins, tacked together, and 
thrown over the shoulders like a herald's coat 
without sleeves." 

An old schoolfellow of ours (who, by the 
way, was more fond of quoting Falstaff than 
any other of Shakspeare's characters) used to 
be called upon for a story, with a view to a 
joke of this sort ; it being an understood thing, 
that he had a privilege of exaggeration, with- 
out committing his abstract love of truth. The 
reader knows the old blunder attributed to 
Goldsmith about a dish of green peas. Some- 
body had been applauded in company for 
advising his cook to take some ill-dressed 
peas to Hammersmith, " because that was the 
way to Turn'em Green ;" upon which Gold- 
smith is said to have gone and repeated the 
pun at another table in this fashion : — " John 
should take those peas, I think, to Hammer- 
smith." "Why so, Doctor?" "Because that 
is the way to make 'em green." Now our 
friend would give the blunder with this sort 
of additional dressing : " At sight of the dishes 
of vegetables, Goldsmith, who was at his own 
house, took off the covers, one after another, 
with great anxiety, till he found that peas 
were among them ; upon which he rubbed his 
hands with an air of infinite and prospective 
satisfaction. 'You are fond of peas, Sir?' 
said one of the company. ( Yes, Sir,' said 
Goldsmith, * particularly so : — I eat them all 
the year round ; — I mean, Sir, every day in 
the season. I do not think there is anybody 
so fond of peas as I am.' £ Is there any par- 
ticular reason, Doctor,' asked a gentleman 
present, ' why you like peas so much, beyond 
the usual one of their agreeable taste V — 'No, 
Sir, none whatsoever: — none, I assure you' 
(here Goldsmith showed a great wish to 
impress this fact on his guests) : ' 1 never 
heard any particular encomium or speech 
about them from any one else : but they carry 
their own eloquence with them : they are 
things, Sir, of infinite taste.' (Here a laugh, 
which put Goldsmith in additional spirits.) 
But, bless me !' he exclaimed, looking narrowly 
into the peas :— c I fear they are very ill-done : 



16 



THE INDICATOR. 



they are absolutely yellow instead of green'' 
(here he put a strong emphasis on green) ; 
' and you know, peas should be emphatically 
green : — greenness in a pea is a quality as 
essential, as whiteness in a lily The cook 
has quite spoilt them : — but I'll give the rogue 
a lecture, gentlemen, with your permission.' 
Goldsmith then rose and rang the bell violently 
for the cook, who came in ready booted and 
spurred. 'Ha!' exclaimed Goldsmith, ' those 
boots and spurs are your salvation, you knave. 
Do you know, Sir, what you have done V — e No, 
Sir.' — c Why, you have made the peas yellow, 
Sir. Go instantly, and take 'em to Hammer- 
smith.' ' To Hammersmith, Sir?' cried the man, 
all in astonishment, the guests being no less so : 
— ' please Sir, why am I to take 'em to Ham- 
mersmith ?' — 'Because, Sir,' (and here Gold- 
smith looked round with triumphant antici- 
pation) ' that is the way to render those peas 
green.' " 

There is a very humorous piece of exaggera- 
tion in Butler's Remains, — a collection, by the 
bye, well worthy of Hudibras, and indeed of 
more interest to the general reader. Butler 
is defrauded of his fame with readers of taste 
who happen to be no politicians, when Hudibras 
is printed without this appendage. The piece 
we allude to is a short description of Hol- 
land : — 

A country that draws fifty foot of water, 
In which men live as in the hold of nature ; 
And when the sea does in upon them hreak, 
And drowns a province, does but spring a leak. 
***** 

That feed, like cannibals, on other fishes, 
And serve their cousin-germans up in dishes. 
A land that rides at anchor, and is moored, 
In which they do not live, but go aboard. 

We do not know, and perhaps it would be 
impossible to discover, whether Butler wrote 
his minor pieces before those of the great patriot 
Andrew Marvell, who rivalled him in wit and 
excelled him in poetry. Marvell, though born 
later, seems to have been known earlier as an 
author. He was certainly known publicly 
before him. But in the political poems of 
Marvell, there is a ludicrous character of Hol- 
land, which might be pronounced to be either 
the copy or the original of Butler's, if in those 
anti-Batavian times the Hollander had not 
been baited by all the wits ; and were it not 
probable, that the unwieldy monotony of his 
character gave rise to much the same ludicrous 
imagery in many of their fancies. Marvell's 
wit has the advantage of Butler's, not in learn- 
ing or multiplicity of contrasts (for nobody 
ever beat him there), but in a greater variety of 
them, and in being able,from the more poetical 
turn of his mind, to bring graver and more 
imaginative things to wait upon his levity. 

He thus opens the battery upon our amphi- 
bious neighbour : 

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, 
As but the off-scouring of the British sand ; 



And so much earth as was contributed 
By English pilots, when they heaved the lead ; 
Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell, 
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell. 
* * * * * 

Glad then, as miners who have found the ore, 
They, with mad labour,* fished the land to shore ; 
And dived as desperately for each piece 
Of earth, as if it had been of ambergreece ; 
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, 
Less than what building swallows bear away ; 
Or than those pills which sordid beetles rowl, 
Transfusing into them their dunghill soul. 

He goes on in a strain of exquisite hyper- 
bole : — 

How did they rivet with gigantic piles 
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles ; 
And to the stake a struggling country bound, 
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground ; 
Building their wat'ry Babel far more high 
To catch the waves, than those to scale the sky. 
Yet still his claim the injured ocean layed, 
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played ; 
As if on purpose it on land had come 
To shew them what's their Mare Liberumf : 
A dayly deluge over them does boil ; 
The earth and water play at level-coyl ; 
The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed, 
And sat, not as at meat, but as a guest : 
And oft the Tritons, and the Sea-nymphs, saw 
Whole shoals of Dutch served up for cabillau. 
Or, as they over the new level ranged, 
For pickled herrings, pickled Heeren changed. 
Nature, it seemed, ashamed of her mistake, 
Would throw their land away at duck and drake : 
Therefore necessity, that first made kings, 
Something like government among them brings : 
For as with Pigmys, who best kills the crane, 
Among the hungry he that treasures grain, 
Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns, 
So rules among the drowned he that drains. 
Not who first sees the rising sun, commands ; 
But who could first discern the rising lands ; 
Who best could know to pump an earth so leak, 
Him they their lord and country's father speak ; 
To make a bank was a great plot of state ; — 
Invent a shovel, and be a magistrate. 

We can never read these and some other 
ludicrous verses of Marvell, even when by 
ourselves, without laughter. 



XIII.— GILBERT ! GILBERT ! 

The sole idea generally conveyed to us by 
historians of Thomas a Becket is that of a 
haughty priest, who tried to elevate the reli- 
gious power above the civil. But in looking 
more narrowly into the accounts of him, it 
appears that for a considerable part of his life 
he was a merry layman, was a great falconer, 
feaster, and patron, as well as man of business ; 
and he wore all characters with such unaffected 
pleasantness, that he was called the Delight of 
the Western World. 

On a sudden, to every body's surprise, his 
friend the king (Henry II.), from chancellor 

* Dryden afterwards, of fighting for gain, in his song of 
Come, if you dare^- 

" The Gods from above the mad labour behold." 
t A Free Ocean. 



NERVOUS DISORDERS. 



17 



made him archbishop ; and with equal sudden- 
ness, though retaining his affability, the new- 
head of the English church put off all his 
worldly graces and pleasures (save and except 
a rich gown over his sackcloth), and in the 
midst of a gay court, became the most mortified 
of ascetics. Instead of hunting and hawking, 
he paced a solitary cloister ; instead of his 
wine, he drank fennel-water ; and in lieu of 
soft clothing, he indulged his back in stripes. 

This phenomenon has divided the opinions 
of the moral critics. Some insist, that Becket 
was religiously in earnest, and think the change 
natural to a man of the world, whose heart 
had been struck with reflection. Others see 
in his conduct nothing but ambition. We 
suspect that three parts of the truth are with 
the latter ; and that Becket, suddenly enabled 
to dispute a kind of sovereignty with his 
prince and friend, gave way to the new tempt- 
ation, just as he had done to his falconry and 
fine living. But the complete alteration of his 
way of life, — the enthusiasm which enabled 
him to set up so different a greatness against 
his former one — shows, that his character 
partook at least of as much sincerity, as would 
enable him to delude himself in good taste. 
In proportion as his very egotism was con- 
cerned, it was likely that such a man would 
exalt the gravity and importance of his new 
calling. He had flourished at an earthly 
court : he now wished to be as great a man in 
the eyes of another ; and worldly power, which 
was at once to be enjoyed and despised by 
virtue of his office, had a zest given to its pos- 
session, of which the incredulousness of mere 
insincerity could know nothing. 

Thomas a Becket may have inherited a 
romantic turn of mind from his mother, whose 
story is a singular one. His father, Gilbert 
Becket, a flourishing citizen, had been in his 
youth a soldier in the crusades ; and being 
taken prisoner, became slave to an Emir, or 
Baracen prince. By degrees he obtained the 
confidence of his master, and was admitted to 
his company, where he met a personage who 
became more attached to him. This was the 
Emir's daughter. Whether by her means or 
not does not appear, but after some time he 
contrived to escape. The lady with her loving 
heart followed him. She knew, they say, but 
two words of his language, — London and 
Gilbert ; and by repeating the former she 
obtained a passage in a vessel, arrived in 
England, and found her trusting way to the 
metropolis. She then took to her other talis- 
man, and went from street to street pronounc- 
ing " Gilbert !" A crowd collected about her 
wherever she went, asking of course a thou- 
sand questions, and to all she had but one 
answer — Gilbert ! Gilbert ! — She found her 
faith in it sufficient. Chance, or her determi- 
nation to go through every street, brought her 
at last to the one, in which he who had won 



her heart in slavery, was living in good con- 
dition. The crowd drew the family to the 
window ; his servant recognised her ; and 
Gilbert Becket took to his arms and his bridal 
bed, his far-come princess, with her solitary 
fond word. 



XIV. FATAL MISTAKE OF NERVOUS 
DISORDERS FOR MADNESS. 

Some affecting catastrophes in the public 
papers induce us to say a few words on the 
mistaken notions which are so often, in our 
opinion, the cause of their appearance. It is 
much to be wished that some physician, truly 
so called, and philosophically competent to 
the task, would write a work on this subject. 
We have plenty of books on symptoms and 
other alarming matters, very useful for in- 
creasing the harm already existing. We 
believe also there are . some works of a dif- 
ferent kind, if not written in direct counter- 
action ; but the learned authors are apt to be 
so grand and etymological in their title-pages, 
that they must frighten the general under- 
standing with their very advertisements. '' 

There is this great difference between what 
is generally understood by the word madness, 
and the nervous or melancholy disorders, the 
excess of which is so often confounded with 
it. Madness is a consequence of malformation 
of the brain, and is by no means of necessity 
attended with melancholy or even ill-health. 
The patient, in the very midst of it, is often 
strong, healthy, and even cheerful. On the 
other hand, nervous disorders, or even melan- 
choly in its most aggravated state, is nothing 
but the excess of a state of stomach and blood, 
extremely common. The mind no doubt will 
act upon that state and exasperate it ; but 
there is great re-action between mind and 
body : and as it is a common thing for a man I 
in an ordinary fever, or fit of the bile, to be | 
melancholy, and even to do or feel inclined to i 
do an extravagant thing, so it is as common \ 
for him to get well and be quite cheerful again. J 
Thus it is among witless people that the true ! 
madness will be found. It is the more intelli- 
gent that are subject to the other disorders ; j 
and a proper use of their intelligence will 
show them what the disorders are. 

But weak treatment may frighten the intel- 
ligent. A kind person, for instance, in a fit of 
melancholy, may confess that he feels an incli- 
nation to do some desperate or even cruel 
thing. This is often treated at once as mad- 
ness, instead of an excess of the kind just 
mentioned ; and the person seeing he is thought 
out of his wits, begins to think himself so, and 
at last acts as if he were. This is a lament- 
able evil ; but it does not stop here. The 
children or other relatives of the person may 
become victims to the mistake. They think 



IS 



THE INDICATOR. 



there is madness, as the phrase is, "in the 
family ;" and so whenever they feel ilh or 
meet with a misfortune, the thought will 
prey upon their minds ; and this may lead to 
catastrophes, with which they have really no 
more to do than any other sick or unfortunate 
people. How many persons have committed 
an extravagance in a brain fever, or undergone 
hallucinations of mind in consequence of getting 
an ague, or taking opium, or fifty other causes ; 
and yet the moment the least wandering of 
mind is observed in them, others become 
frightened ; their fright is manifested beyond 
all necessity ; and the patients and their 
family must suffer for it. They seem to think, 
that no disorder can properly be held a true 
Christian sickness, and fit for charitable inter- 
pretation, but where the patient has gone 
regularly to bed, and had curtains, and caudle- 
cups, and nurses about him, like a well-behaved 
respectable sick gentleman. But this state of 
things implies muscular weakness, or weak- 
ness of that sort which renders the bodily 
action feeble. Now, in nervous disorders, the 
muscular action may be as strong as ever ; 
and people may reasonably be allowed a world 
of illness, sitting in their chairs, or even walk- 
ing or running. 

These mistaken pronoun cers upon disease 
ought to be told, that when they are thus 
unwarrantably frightened, they are partaking 
of the very essence of what they misappre- 
hend ; for it is fear, in ail its various degrees 
and modifications, which is at the bottom of 
nervousness and melancholy ; not fear in its 
ordinary sense, as opposed to cowardice (for a 
man who would shudder at a bat or a vague 
idea, may be bold as a lion against an enemy), 
but imaginative fear ; — fear either of something 
known or of the patient knows not what ; — a 
vague sense of terror, — an impulse, — an appre- 
hension of ill, — dwelling upon some painful and 
worrying thought. Now this suffering is in- 
variably connected with a weak state of the 
body in some respects, particularly of the 
stomach. Hundreds will be found to have 
felt it, if patients inquire ; but the mind is 
sometimes afraid of acknowledging its appre- 
hensions, even to itself ; and thus fear broods 
over and hatches fear. 

These disorders, generally speaking, are 
greater or less in their effects according to the 
exercise of reason. But do not let the word 
be misunderstood : we should rather say, 
according to the extent of the knowledge. A 
very imaginative man will indeed be likely to 
suffer more than others ; but if his knowledge 
is at all in proportion, he will also get through 
his evil better than an uninformed man suffer- 
ing great terrors. And the reason is, that he 
knows how much bodily unhealthiness has to 
do with it. The very words that frighten the 
unknowing might teach them better, if under- 
stood. Thus insanity itself properly means 



nothing but unhealthiness or unsoundness. 
Derangement explains itself, and may surely 
mean very harmless things. Melancholy is 
compounded of two words which signify black 
bile. Hypochondria is the name of one of the 
regions of the stomach, a very instructive 
etymology. And lunacy refers to effects, real 
or imaginary, of particular states of the moon ; 
which if anything after all, are nothing more 
than what every delicate constitution feels in 
its degree from particular states of the weather ; 
for weather, like the tides, is apt to be in such 
and such a condition, when the moon presents 
such and such a face. 
It has been said, 

Great wits to madness nearly are allied. 

It is curious that he who wrote the saying 
(Dryden) was a very sound wit to the end of 
his life ; while his wife, who was of a weak 
understanding, became insane. An excellent 
writer (Wordsworth) has written an idle 
couplet about the insanity of poets : 

We poets enter on our path with gladness, 

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. 

If he did not mean madness in the ordinary 
sense, he should not have written this line ; if 
he did, he ought not to have fallen, in the teeth 
of his better knowledge, into so vulgar an 
error. There are very few instances of insane 
poets, or of insane great understandings of any 
sort. Bacon, Milton, Newton, Shakspeare, 
Cervantes, &c. were all of minds as sound as 
they were great. So it has been with the infi- 
nite majority of literary men of all countries. 
If Tasso and a few others were exceptions, 
they were but exceptions ; and the derange- 
ment in these eminent men has very doubtful 
characters about it, and is sometimes made a 
question. It may be pretty safely affirmed, at 
least, upon an examination of it, that had they 
not been the clever men they were, it would 
have been much worse and less equivocal. 
Collins, whose case was after all one of inani- 
tion rather than insanity, had been a free 
liver ; and seems to have been hurt by having 
a fortune left him. Cowper was weak-bodied, 
and beset by Methodists. Swift's body was 
full of bad humours. He himself attributed 
his disordered system to the effects of a surfeit 
of fruit on his stomach ; and in his last illness 
he used to break out in enormous boils and 
blisters. This was a violent effort of nature 
to help and purify the current of his blood, — 
the main object in all such cases. Dr. John- 
son, who was subject to mists of melancholy, 
used to fancy he should go mad ; but he never 
did. 

Exercise, conversation, cheerful society, 
amusements of all sorts, or a kind, patient, 
and gradual helping of the bodily health, till 
the mind be capable of amusement (for it 
should never foolishly be told " not to think" 



MISTS AND FOGS. 



19 



of melancholy things, without having some- 
thing done for it to mend the bodily health), — 
these are the cures, the only cures, and in our 
opinion the almost infallible cures of nervous 
disorders, however excessive. Above all, the 
patient should be told, that there has often 
been an end to that torment of one haunting 
idea, which is indeed a great and venerable 
suffering. Many persons have got over it in a 
week, a few weeks, or a month, some in a few 
months, some not for years, but they have got 
over it at last. There is a remarkable instance 
of this in the life of our great king Alfred. 
He was seized, says his contemporary biogra- 
pher, with such a strange illness while sitting 
at table, in the twenty-fifth year (we think) of 
his age, that he shrieked aloud ; and for twenty 
years afterwards this illness so preyed upon 
him, that the relief of one hour was embittered 
by what he dreaded would come the next. 
His disorder is conjectured by some to have 
been an internal cancer ; by others, with more 
probability, the black bile, or melancholy. 
The physicians of those times knew nothing 
about it ; and the people showed at once their 
ignorance, and their admiration of the king, 
by saying that the devil had caused it out of 
jealousy. It was probably produced by anxiety 
for the state of his country ; but the same 
thing which wounded him may have helped to 
keep him up ; for he had plenty of business to 
attend to, and fought with his own hand in 
fifty-six pitched battles. Now exactly twenty 
years after, in the forty-fifth year of his age (if 
our former recollection is right) this disorder 
totally left him ; and his great heart was where 
it ought to be, in a heaven of health and calm- 



XV.— MISTS AND FOGS. 

Fogs and mists, being nothing but vapours 
which the cold air will not suffer to evaporate, 
must sometimes present a gorgeous aspect 

1 next the sun. To the eye of an eagle, or 
whatever other eyes there may be to look 
down upon them, they may appear like masses 

j of cloudy gold. In fact, they are but clouds 
unrisen. The city of London, at the time we 
are writing this article, is literally a city in 
the clouds. Its inhabitants walk through the 
same airy heaps which at other times float 
over their heads in the sky, or minister with 
glorious faces to the setting sun. 

We do not say, that any one can u hold a 
fire in his hand," by thinking on a fine sunset ; 
or that sheer imagination of any sort can make 
it a very agreeable thing to feel as if one's 
body were wrapped round with cold wet 
paper ; much less to flounder through gutters, 
or run against posts. But the mind can often 
help itself with agreeable images against dis- 
agreeable ones ; or pitch itself round to the 



best sides and aspects of them. The solid and 
fiery ball of the sun, stuck as it were, in the 
thick foggy atmosphere ; the moon just win- 
ning her way through it, into beams ; nay, the 
very candles and gas-lights in the shop windows 
of a misty evening, — all have, in our eyes, their 
agreeable varieties of contrast to the surround- 
ing haze. We have even halted, of a dreary 
autumnal evening, at that open part of the 
Strand by St. Clement's, and seen the church, 
which is a poor structure of itself, take an 
aspect of ghastly grandeur from the dark 
atmosphere ; looking like a tall white mass, 
mounting up interminably into the night over- 
head. 

The poets, who are the common friends that 
keep up the intercourse between nature and 
humanity, have in numberless passages done 
justice to these our melancholy visitors, and 
shown us what grand personages they are. To 
mention only a few of the most striking. 
When Thetis, in the Iliad (lib. i., v. 359) rises 
out of the sea to console Achilles, she issues 
forth in a mist ; like the Genius in the Arabian 
Nights. The reader is to suppose that the 
mist, after ascending, comes gliding over the 
water ; and condensing itself into a human 
shape, lands the white-footed goddess on the 
shore. 

When Achilles, after his long and vindictive 
absence from the Greek armies, re-appears in 
consequence of the death of his friend Patro- 
clus, and stands before the appalled Trojan 
armies, who are thrown into confusion at the 
very sight, Minerva, to render his aspect the 
more astonishing and awful, puts about his 
head a halo of golden mist, streaming upwards 
with fire. (Lib. xviii., v. 205.) He shouts 
aloud under this preternatural diadem ; Mi- 
nerva throws into his shout her own immortal 
voice with a strange unnatural cry ; at which 
the horses of the Trojan warriors run round 
with their chariots, and twelve of their noblest 
captains perish in the crush. 

A mist was the usual clothing of the gods, 
when they descended to earth ; especially of 
Apollo, whose brightness had double need of 
mitigation. Homer, to heighten the dignity 
of Ulysses, has finely given him the same 
covering, when he passes through the court of 
Antinous, and suddenly appears before the 
throne. This has been turned to happy account 
by Virgil, and to a new and noble one by Milton. 
Virgil makes JEneas issue suddenly from a 
mist, at the moment when his friends think 
him lost, and the beautiful queen of Carthage 
is wishing his presence. Milton, — but we will 
give one or two of his minor uses of mists, by 
way of making a climax of the one alluded to. 
If Satan, for instance, goes lurking about 
Paradise, it is "like a black mist low creep- 
ing." If the angels on guard glide about it, 
upon their gentler errand, it is like fairer 
vapours :' 

c 2 






20 



THE INDICATOR. 



On the ground 
Gliding meteorous, as evening mist 
Risen from a river o'er the marish glides, 
And gathers ground fast at the labourer's heel 
Homeward returning.— (Par. Lost, B. xn. v. G28.) 

Now behold one of his greatest imagina- 
tions. The fallen demi-gods are assembled 
in Pandsemonium, waiting the return of their 
" great adventurer " from his u search of 
worlds : " 

He throTigh the midst unmarked, 
In show plebeian angel militant 
Of lowest order, passed ; and from the door 
Of that Plutonian hall, invisible, 
Ascended his high throne ; which, under state 
Of richest texture spread, at the upper end 
Was placed in regal lustre. Down awhile 
He sat, and round about him saw unseen. 
At last — as from a cloud, his fulgent head 
And shape star-bright appeared, or brighter ; clad 
With what permissive glory since his fall 
Was left him, or false glitter. All amazed 
At that so sudden blaze, the Stygian throng 
Bent their aspect ; and whom they wished, beheld, 
Their mighty chief returned. 

There is a piece of imagination in Apollo- 
nius Rhodius worthy of Milton or Homer. 
The Argonauts, in broad daylight, are sud- 
denly benighted at sea with a black fog. They 
pray to Apollo ; and he descends from heaven, 
and lighting on a rock, holds up his illustrious 
bow, which shoots a guiding light for them to 
an island. 

Spenser in a most romantic chapter of the 
Faery Queene (Book n.), seems to have taken 
the idea of a benighting from Apollonius, as 
well as to have had an eye to some passages 
of the Odyssey ; but like all great poets, what 
he borrows only brings worthy companionship 
to some fine invention of his own. It is a 
scene thickly beset with horror. Sir Guyon, 
in the course of his voyage through the peril- 
ous sea, wishes to stop and hear the Syrens : 
but the palmer, his companion, dissuades 
him : 

When suddeinly a grosse fog overspred 
With his dull vapour all that desert has, 
And heaven's chearefull face enveloped, 
That all things one, and one as nothing was, 
And this great universe seemed one confused mass. 

Thereat they greatly were dismayd, ne wist 
How to direct theyr way in darkness wide, 
But feared to wander in that wastefull mist 
For tombling into mischiefe unespyde : 
Worse is the daunger hidden then descride. 
Suddeinly an innumerable flight 
Of harmfull fowles about them fluttering cride, 
And with theyr wicked wings them oft did smight, 
And sore annoyed, groping in that griesly night. 

Even all the nation of unfortunate 
And fatail birds about them flocked were, 
Such as by nature men abhorre and hate ; 
The ill-faced owle, deaths dreadful messengere : 
The hoarse night-raven, trump of dolefull drere : 
The lether-winged batt, dayes enimy : 
The ruefull stritch, still waiting on the here : 
The whistler shrill, that whoso heares doth dy ; 
The hellish harpies, prophets of sad destiny : 



All these, and all that else does horror breed, 
About them flew, and fild their sayles with fear ; 
Yet stayd they not, but forward did proceed, 
Whiles th' one did row, and th' other stifly steare. 

Ovid has turned a mist to his usual account. 
It is where Jupiter, to conceal his amour 
with Io, throws a cloud over the vale of 
Tempe. There is a picture of Jupiter and Io, 
by Correggio, in which that great artist has 
finely availed himself of the circumstance ; 
the head of the father of gods and men com- 
ing placidly out of the cloud, upon the young 
lips of Io, like the very benignity of crea- 
tion. 

The poet who is the most conversant with 
mists is Ossian, who was a native of the north 
of Scotland or Ireland. The following are as 
many specimens of his uses of mist, as we have 
room for. The first is very grand ; the second 
as happy in its analogy ; the third is ghastly, 
but of more doubtful merit : 

Two Chiefs parted by their King. — They sunk from the 
king on either side, like two columns of morning mist, 
when the sun rises between them on his glittering rocks. 
Dark is their rolling on either side, each towards its reedy 
pool. 

A great Enemy. — I love a foe like Cathmor : his soul is 
great ; his arm is strong ; his battles are full of fame. 
But the little soul is like a vapour, that hovers roimd the 
marshy lake. It never rises on the green hill, lest the 
winds meet it there. 

A terrible Omen. — A mist rose slowly from the lake. It 
came, in the figure of an aged man, along the silent plain. 
Its large limbs did not move in steps ; for a ghost sup- 
ported it in mid air. It came towards Selma's hall, and 
dissolved in a shower of blood. 

We must mention another instance of the 
poetical use of a mist, if it is only to indulge 
ourselves in one of those masterly passages of 
Dante, in which he contrives to unite minute- 
ness of detail with the most grand and sove- 
reign effect. It is in a lofty comparison of the 
planet Mars looking through morning vapours; 
the reader will see with what (Purgatorio, c. u. 
v. 10). Dante and his guide Virgil have just 
left the infernal regions, and are lingering 
on a solitary sea-shore in purgatory ; which 
reminds us of that still and far-thoughted 



Lone sitting by the shores cf old romance. 
But to our English-like Italian. 

Noi eravam lungh' esso '1 mare ancora, &c. 

That solitary shore we still kept on, 

Like men, who musing on their journey, stay 
At rest in body, yet in heart are gone ; 

When lo ! as at the early dawn of day, 

Red Mars looks deepening through the foggy heat, 
Down in the west, far o'er the watery way ; 

So did mine eyes behold (so may they yet) 
A light, which came so swiftly o'er the sea, 
That never wing with such a fervour beat. 

I did but turn to ask what it might be 
Of my sage leader, when its orb had got 
More large meanwhile, and came more gloriously : 



THE SHOEMAKER OF VEYROS. 



21 



And by degrees, I saw I knew not what 
Of white about it ; and beneath the white 
Another. My great master uttered not 

One word, till those first issuing candours bright 
Fanned into wings ; but soon as he had found 
Who was the mighty voyager now in sight, 

He cried aloud, " Down, down, upon the ground, 
It is God's Angel." 



XVI.— THE SHOEMAKER OF VEYROS, 

A PORTUGUESE TRADITION. 

In the time of the old kings of Portugal, 
Don John, a natural son of the reigning prince, 
was governor of the town of Veyros, in the 
province of Alentejo. The town was situate 
(perhaps is there still) upon a mountain, at 
the foot of which runs a river ; and at a little 
distance there was a ford over it, under another 
eminence. The hed of the river thereabouts 
was so high as to form a shallow sandy place ; 
and in that clear spot of water, the maidens of 
Veyros, both of high rank and humble, used to 
wash their clothes. 

It happened one day, that Don John, riding 
out with a company, came to the spot at the 
time the young women were so employed : 
and being, says our author, " a young and lusty 
gallant," he fell to jesting with his followers 
upon the bare legs of the busy girls, who had 
tucked up their clothes, as usual, to their work. 
He passed along the river ; and all his com- 
pany had not yet gone by, when a lass in a 
red petticoat, while tucking it up, showed her 
legs somewhat high ; and clapping her hand 
on her right calf, said loud enough to be heard 
by the riders, " Here's a white leg, girls, for 
the Master of Avis *." 

These words, spoken probably out of a little 
lively bravado, upon the strength of the go- 
vernor's having gone by, were repeated to him 
when he got home, together with the action 
that accompanied them : upon which the young 
lord felt the eloquence of the speech so deeply, 
that he contrived to have the fair speaker 
brought to him in private ; and the conse- 
quence was, that, our lively natural son, and his 
sprightly challenger, had another natural son. 

Ines (for that was the girl's name) was the 
daughter of a shoemaker in Veyros ; a man of 
very good account, and wealthy. Hearing 
how his daughter had been sent for to the 
young governor's house, and that it was her 
own light behaviour that subjected her to what 
he was assured she willingly consented to, he 
took it so to heart, that at her return home, 
she was driven by him from the house, with 
every species of contumely and spurning. 
After this, he never saw her more. And to 
prove to the world and to himself, that his 
severity was a matter of principle, and not a 
mere indulgence of his own passions, he never 

* An order of knighthood, of which Dod John was 
Master. 



afterwards lay in a bed, nor ate at a table, nor 
changed his linen, nor cut his hair, nails, or 
beard ; which latter grew to such a length, 
reaching below his knees, that the people used 
to call him Barbadon, or Old Beardy. 

In the meantime, his grandson, called Don 
Alphonso, not only grew to be a man, but was 
created Duke of Braganza, his father Don 
John having been elected to the crown of 
Portugal ; which he wore after such noble 
fashion, to the great good of his country, as to 
be surnamed the Memorable. Now the town 
of Veyros stood in the middle of seven or 
eight others, all belonging to the young Duke, 
from whose palace at Villa Viciosa it was but 
four leagues distant. He therefore had good 
intelligence of the shoemaker his grandfather ; 
and being of a humane and truly generous 
spirit, the accounts he received of the old 
man's way of life made him extremely desirous 
of paying him a visit. He accordingly went 
with a retinue to Veyros ; and meeting Bar- 
badon in the streets, he alighted from his horse, 
bareheaded, and in the presence of that stately 
company and the people, asked the old man 
his blessing. The shoemaker, astonished at this 
sudden spectacle, and at the strange contrast 
which it furnished to his humble rank, stared 
in a bewildered manner upon the unknown 
personage, who thus knelt to him in the public 
way; and said, "Sir, do you mock me?" — 
" No," answered the Duke ; " may God so help 
me, as I do not : but in earnest I crave I 
may kiss your hand and receive your blessing, 
for I am your grandson, and son to Ines your 
daughter, conceived by the king, my lord and 
father." No sooner had the shoemaker heard 
these words, than he clapped his hands before 
his eyes, and said, " God bless me from ever 
beholding the son of so wicked a daughter as 
mine was ! And yet, forasmuch as you are not 
guilty of her offence, hold ; take my hand and 
my blessing, in the name of the Father, and of 
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." So saying, 
he laid one of his old hands upon the young 
man's head, blessing him ; but neither the 
Duke nor his followers could persuade him to 
take the other away from his eyes ; neither 
would he talk with him a word more. In tins 
spirit, shortly after, he died ; and just before 
his death he directed a tomb to be made for 
him, on which were sculptured the tools be- 
longing to his trade, with this epitaph : — 

" This sepulchre Barbadon caused to be made, 
(Being of Veyros, a shoemaker by his trade) 
For himself and the rest of his race, 
Excepting his daughter Ines in any case." 

The author says, that he has "heard it 
reported by the ancientest persons, that the 
fourth Duke of Braganza, Don James, son to 
Donna Isabel, sister to the King Don Emanuel, 
caused that tomb to be defaced, being the 
sepulchre of his fourth grandfather *." 

* It appears by this, that tho T^on John of the tradition 



22 



THE INDICATOR. 



As for the daughter, the conclusion of whose 
story comes lagging in like a penitent, " she 
continued," says the writer, " after she was 
delivered of that son, a very chaste and vir- 
tuous woman ; and the king made her com- 
mandress of Santos, a most honourable place, 
and very plentiful ; to the which none but 
princesses were admitted, living, as it were, 
abbesses and princesses of a monastery built 
without the walls of Lisbon, called Santos, that 
is Saints, founded by reason of some martyrs 
that were martyred there. And the religious 
women of that place have liberty to marry 
with the knights of their order, before they 
enter into that holy profession." 

The rest of our author's remarks are in too 
curious a spirit to be omitted. " In this mo- 
nastery," he says, " the same Donna Ines died, 
leaving behind her a glorious reputation for 
her virtue and holiness. Observe, gentle 
reader, the constancy that this Portuguese, a 
shoemaker, continued in, loathing to behold 
the honourable estate of his grandchild, nor 
would any more acknowledge his daughter, 
having been a lewd woman, for purchasing 
advancement with dishonour. This consider- 
j ed, you will not wonder at the Count Julian, 
that plagued Spain, and executed the king 
Roderigo for forcing his daughter La Cava. 
The example of this shoemaker is especially 
worthy the noting, and deeply to be consi- 
dered : for, besides, that it makes good our 
assertion, it teaches the higher not to disdain 
! the lower, as long as they be virtuous and 
1 lovers of honour. It may be that this old 
man, for his integrity, rising from a virtuous 
zeal, merited that a daughter coming by des- 
cent from his grandchild, should be made 
Queen of Castile, and the mother of great 
Isabel, grandmother to the Emperor Charles 
the Fifth, and Ferdinando." 

Alas ! a pretty posterity our shoemaker had, 
in Philip the 2nd and his successors, — a race 
more suitable to his severity against his child, 
than his blessing upon his grandchild. Old 
Barbadon was a fine fellow too, after his 
fashion. We do not know how he reconciled 
his unforgiving conduct with his Christianity ; 
but he had enough precedents on that point. 
"What we admire in him is, his showing that 
lie acted out of principle, and did not mistake 
passion for it. His crepidarian sculptures 
indeed are not so well ; but a little vanity may 
be allowed to mingle with and soften such 
edge-tools of self-denial, as he chose to handle. 
His treatment of his daughter was ignorant, 
and in wiser times would have been brutal ; 
especially when it is considered how much 
the conduct of children is modified by educa- 
tion and other circumstances : but then a 



is John the First, who was elected king of Portugal, and 
became famous for his great qualities ; and that his son 
by the alleged shoemaker's daughter was his successor, 
Alphonso the Fifth. 



brutal man would not have accompanied it 
with such voluntary suffering of his own. 
Neither did Barbadon leave his daughter to 
take her chance in the wide world, thinking 
of the evils she might be enduring, only to 
give a greater zest of fancied pity to the 
contentedness of his cruelty. He knew she 
was well taken care of; and if she was not 
to have the enjoyment of his society, he was 
determined that it should be a very uncom- 
fortable one to himself. He knew that she 
lay on a princely bed, while he would have 
none at all. He knew that she was served upon 
gold and silver, while he renounced his old 
chestnut table, — the table at which she used 
to sit. He knew while he sat looking at his 
old beard, and the wilful sordidness of his 
hands, that her locks and her fair limbs were 
objects of worship to the gallant and the great. 
And so he set off his destitutions against her 
over-possession ; and took out the punishment 
he gave her, in revenge upon himself. This 
was the instinct of a man who loved a prin- 
ciple, but hated nobody : — of a man who, in a 
wiser time, would have felt the wisdom of 
kindness. Thus his blessing upon his grand- 
child becomes consistent with his cruelty to 
his child : and his living stock was a fine one 
in spite of him. His daughter showed a sense 
of the wound she had given such a father, by 
relinquishing the sympathies she loved, because 
they had hurt him : and her son, worthy of 
such a grandfather and such a daughter, and 
refined into a gracefulness of knowledge by 
education, thought it no mean thing or vulgar 
to kneel to the grey-headed artisan in the 
street, and beg the blessing of his honest 
hand. 



XVII.— MORE NEWS OF ULYSSES. 

Talking the other day with a friend* about 
Dante, he observed, that whenever so great a 
poet told us anything in addition or continua- 
tion of an ancient story, he had a right to be 
regarded as classical authority. For instance, 
said he, when he tells us of that characteristic 
death of Ulysses in one of the books of his 
Inferno, we ought to receive the information as 
authentic, and be glad that we have more news 
of Ulysses than we looked for. 

We thought this a happy remark, and in- 
stantly turned with him to the passage in 
question. The last account of Ulysses in the 
ancient poets, is his sudden re-appearance 
before the suitors at Ithaca. There is some- 
thing more told of him, it is true, before the 
Odyssey concludes ; but with the exception 
of his visit to his aged father, our memory 
scarcely wishes to retain it ; nor does it con- 
trovert the general impression left upon us, 
that the wandering hero is victorious over his 
* The late Mr. Keats. 



MORE NEWS OF ULYSSES. 



23 



domestic enemies ; and reposes at last, and for 
life, in the bosom of his family. 

The lesser poets, however, could not let him 
alone. Homer leaves the general impression 
upon one's mind, as to the close of his life ; but 
there are plenty of obscurer fables about it 
still. We have specimens in modern times of 
this propensity never to have done with a 
good story ; which is natural enough, though 
not very wise ; nor are the best writers likely 
to meddle with it. Thus Cervantes was 
plagued with a spurious Quixote ; and our 
circulating libraries have the adventures of 
Tom Jones in his Married State. The ancient 
writers on the present subject, availing them- 
selves of an obscure prophecy of Tiresias, who 
tells Ulysses on his visit to hell, that his old 
enemy the sea would be the death of him at 
last, bring over the sea Telegonus, his son by 
the goddess Circe, who gets into a scuffle with 
the Ithacans, and kills his father unknowingly. 
It is added, that Telegonus afterwards return- 
ed to his mother's island, taking Penelope and 
his half-brother Telemachus with him ; and 
here a singular arrangement takes place, 
more after the fashion of a modern Catholic 
dynasty, than an ancient heathen one : for 
while QEdipus was fated to undergo such 
dreadful misfortunes for marrying his mother 
without the knowledge of either party, Minerva 
herself comes down from heaven, on the pre- 
sent occasion, to order Telegonus, the son of 
Ulysses, to marry his father's wife ; the other 
son at the same time making a suitable match 
with his father's mistress, Circe. Telemachus 
seems to have had the best of this extraordinary 
bargain, for Circe was a goddess, consequently 
always young ; and yet to perplex these wind- 
ings-up still more, Telemachus is represented 
by some as marrying Circe's daughter, and 
killing his immortal mother-in-law. Nor does 
the character of the chaste and enduring 
Penelope escape in the confusion. Instead of 
waiting her husband's return in that patient 
manner, she is reported to have been over- 
hospitable to all the suitors ; the consequence 
of which was a son called Pan, being no less 
a personage than the god Pan himself, or 
Nature ; a fiction, as Bacon says, " applied 
very absurdly and indiscreetly." There are 
different stories respecting her lovers ; but it 
is reported that when Ulysses returned from 
Troy, he divorced her for incontinence ; and 
that she fled, and passed her latter days in 
Mantinea. Some even go so far as to say, that 
her father Icarius had attempted to destroy 
her when young, because the oracle had told 
him that she would be the most dissolute of 
the family. This was probably invented by 
the comic writers out of a buffoon malignity ; 
for there are men, so foolishly incredulous 
with regard to principle, that the reputation 
of it, even in a fiction, makes them impatient. 

Now it is impossible to say, whether Dante 



would have left Ulysses quietly with Penelope 
after all his sufferings, had he known them as 
described in Homer. The old Florentine, 
though wilful enough when he wanted to dis- 
pose of a modern's fate, had great veneration 
for his predecessors. At all events, he was 
not acquainted with Homer's works. They 
did not make their way back into Italy till a 
little later. But there were Latin writers 
extant, who might have informed him of the 
other stories relative to Ulysses ; and he saw 
nothing in them, to hinder him from giving 
the great wanderer a death of his own. 

He has accordingly, with great attention to 
nature, made him impatient of staying at 
home, after a life of such adventure and 
excitement. But we will relate the story in 
his own order. He begins it with one of his 
most romantic pieces of wildness. The poet 
and his guide Virgil are making the best of their 
difficult path along a ridge of the craggy rock 
that overhangs the eighth gulf of hell ; when 
Dante, looking down, sees the abyss before 
him full of flickering lights, as numerous, he 
says, as the fire-flies which a peasant, reposing 
on a hill, sees filling the valley, of a hot even- 
ing. Every flame shot about separately ; and 
he knew that some terrible mystery or other 
accompanied it. As he leaned down from the 
rock, grasping one of the crags, in order to 
look closer, his guide, who perceived his ear- 
nestness, said, " Within those fires are spirits ; 
every one swathed in what is burning him." 
Dante told him, that he had already guessed 
as much : and pointing to one of them in par- 
ticular, asked who was in that fire which was 
divided at top, as though it had ascended from 
the funeral-pile of the hating Theban brothers. 
" Within that," answered Virgil, " are Diomed 
and Ulysses, who speed together now to their 
own misery, as they used to do to that of 
others." They were suffering the penalty of 
the various frauds they had perpetrated in 
concert ; such as the contrivance of the Trojan 
horse, and the theft of the Palladium. Dante 
entreats, that if those who are within the 
sparkling horror can speak, it may be made to 
come near. Virgil says it shall ; but begs the 
Florentine not to question it himself, as the 
spirits, being Greek, might be shy of holding 
discourse with him. When the flame has 
come near enough to be spoken to, Virgil 
addresses the " two within one fire ; " and 
requests them, if he ever deserved anything of 
them as a poet, great or little, that they would 
not go away, till one of them had told him how 
he came into that extremity. 

At this, says Dante, the greater horn of the 
old fire began to lap hither and thither, mur- 
muring ; like a flame struggling with the wind. 
The top then, yearning to and fro, like a tongue 
trying to speak, threw out a voice, and said ; 
" When I departed from Circe, who withdrew 
me to her for more than a year in the neigh- 



24 



THE INDICATOR. 



bourhood of Gaieta, before iEneas had so 
named it, neither the sweet company of my 
son, nor pious affection of my old father, nor 
the long-owed love with which I ought to have 
gladdened Penelope, could conquer the ardour 
that was in me to become wise in knowledge 
of the world, of man's vices and his virtue. I 
put forth into the great open deep with only 
one bark, and the small remaining crew by 
whom I had not been left. I saw the two 
shores on either side, as far as Spain and 
Morocco ; and the island of Sardinia, and the 
other isles which the sea there bathes round 
about. Slowly we went, my companions and 
I, for we were old ; till at last we came to that 
narrow outlet, where Hercules set up his pillars, 
that no man might go further. I left Seville 
on the right hand : on the other I had left 
Ceuta. O brothers, said I, who through a 
hundred thousand perils are at length arrived 
at the west, deny not to the short waking day 
that yet remains to our senses, an insight into 
the unpeopled world, setting your backs upon 
the sun. Consider the stock from which ye 
sprang : ye were not made to live like the 
brute beasts, but to follow virtue and know- 
ledge. I so sharpened my companions with 
this little speech on our way, that it would 
have been difficult for me to have withheld 
them, if I would. We left the morning right 
in our stern, and made wings of our oars for 
the idle flight, always gaining upon the left. 
The night now beheld all the stars of the 
other pole ; while our own was so low, that it 
arose not out of the ocean-floor. Five times 
the light had risen underneath the moon, and 
five times fallen, since we put forth upon the 
great deep ; when we descried a dim mountain 
in the distance, which appeared higher to me 
than ever I had seen any before. We rejoiced, 
and as soon mourned : for there sprung a 
whirlwind from the new land, and struck the 
foremost frame of our vessel. Three times, 
with all the waters, it whirled us round ; at 
the fourth it dashed the stern up in air, and 
the prow downwards ; till, as seemed fit to 
others, the ocean, closed above our heads." 

Tre volte il f e girar con tutte i' acque : 
A la quarta levar la poppa in suso, 
E la prora ive in giu, come altrui piacque, 
Infin ch '1 mar fu sopra noi richiuso. 

Why poor Ulysses should find himself in 
hell after his immersion, and be condemned to 
a swathing of eternal fire, while St. Dominic, 
who deluged Christianity with fire and blood, 
is called a Cherubic Light, the Papist, not the 
poet, must explain. He puts all the Pagans in 
hell, because, however good some of them may 
have been, they lived before Christ, and could 
not worship God properly — (debitamente). But 
he laments their state, and represents them as 
suffering a mitigated punishment : they only 
live in a state of perpetual desire without hope 



(sol di tanto offesi) ! A sufficing misery, it must 
be allowed ; but compared with the horrors he 
fancies for heretics and others, undoubtedly a 
great relief. Dante, throughout his extraordi- 
nary work, gives many evidences of great 
natural sensibility ; and his countenance, as 
handed down to us, as well as the shade-struck 
gravity of his poetry, shows the cuts and dis- 
quietudes of heart he must have endured. 
But unless the occasional hell of his own 
troubles, and his consciousness of the muta- 
bility of all things, helped him to discover the 
brevity of individual suffering as a particular, 
and the lastingness of nature's benevolence as 
a universal, and thus gave his poem an inten- 
tion beyond what appears upon the surface, 
we must conclude, that a bigoted education, 
and the fierce party politics in which he was a 
leader and sufferer, obscured the greatness of 
his spirit. It is always to be recollected, how- 
ever, as Mr. Coleridge has observed somewhere 
in other words, that when men consign each 
other to eternal punishment and such-like 
horrors, their belief is rather a venting of 
present impatience and dislike, than anything 
which they take it for. The fiercest Papist or 
Calvinist only flatters himself (a strange flat- 
tery, too !) that he could behold a fellow- 
creature tumbling and shrieking about in 
eternal fire. He would begin shrieking himself 
in a few minutes ; and think that he and all 
heaven ought to pass away, rather than that 
one such agony should continue. Tertullian 
himself, when he longed to behold the enemies 
of his faith burning and liquefying, only meant, 
without knowing it, that he was in an excessive 
rage at not convincing everybody that read 
him. 



XVIII.— FAR COUNTRIES. 

Imagination, though no mean thing, is not 
a proud one. If it looks down from its wings 
upon common-places, it only the more perceives 
the vastness of the region about it. The 
infinity into which its flight carries it, might 
indeed throw back upon it a too great sense of 
insignificance, did not Beauty or Moral Justice, 
with its equal eye, look through that blank 
aspect of power, and re-assure it ; showing it 
that there is a power as much above power 
itself, as the thought that reaches to all, is to 
the hand that can touch only thus far. 

But we do not wish to get into this tempting 
region of speculation j u st n o w . We only intend 
to show the particular instance, in which 
imagination instinctively displays its natural 
humility : we mean, the fondness which ima- 
ginative times and people have shown for what 
is personally remote from them ; for what is 
opposed to their own individual conscious- 
ness, even in range of space, in farness of situ- 
ation. 



FAR COUNTRIES. 



25 



There is no surer mark of a vain people than 
their treating other nations with contempt, 
especially those of whom they know least. It 
is better to verify the proverb, and take every 
thing unknown for magnificent, than predeter- 
mine it to be worthless. The gain is greater. 
The instinct is more judicious. When we 
mention the French as an instance, we do not 
mean to be invidious. Most nations have their 
good as well as bad features. In Vanity Fair 
there are many booths. 

The French, not long ago, praised one of 
their neighbours so highly, that the latter is 
suspected to have lost as much modesty, as the 
former gained by it. But they did this as a 
set-off against their own despots and bigots. 
"When they again became the greatest power 
in Europe, they had a relapse of their old 
egotism. The French, though an amiable and 
intelligent people, are not an imaginative one. 
The greatest height they go is in a balloon. 
They get no farther than France, let them go 
where they will. They " run the great circle 
and are still at home," like the squirrel in his 
rolling cage. Instead of going to Nature in 
their poetry, they would make her come to 
them, and dress herself at their last new toilet. 
In philosophy and metaphysics, they divest 
themselves of gross prejudices, and then think 
they are in as graceful a state of nakedness as 
Adam and Eve. 

At the time when the French had this fit 
upon them of praising the English (which was 
nevertheless the honester one of the two), 
they took to praising the Chinese for number- 
less unknown qualities. This seems a contra- 
diction to the near-sightedness we speak of : 
but the reason they praised them was, that the 
Chinese had the merit of religious toleration : 
a great and extraordinary one certainly, and 
not the less so for having been, to all appear- 
ance, the work of one man. All the romance 
of China, such as it was, — anything in which 
they differed from the French, — their dress, 
their porcelain towers, their Great Wall, — was 
nothing. It was the particular agreement 
with the philosophers. 

It happened, curiously enough, that they 
could not have selected for their panegyric a 
nation apparently more contemptuous of others ; 
or at least more self-satisfied and unimaginative. 
The Chinese are cunning and ingenious ; and 
have a great talent at bowing out ambassadors 
who come to visit them. But it is somewhat 
inconsistent with what appears to be their 
general character, that they should pay 
strangers even this equivocal compliment ; for 
under a prodigious mask of politeness, they are 
not slow to evince their contempt of other 
nations, whenever any comparison is insinuated 
with the subjects of the Brother of the Sun 
and Moon. The knowledge they respect in us 
most is that of gun-making, and of the East- 
[ndian passage. When our countrymen showed 



them a map of the earth, they inquired foi 
China ; and on finding that it only made a 
little piece in a corner, could not contain their 
derision. They thought that it was the main 
territory in the middle, the apple of the world's 
eye. 

On the other hand, the most imaginative 
nations, in their highest times, have had a 
respect for remote countries. It is a mistake 
to suppose that the ancient term barbarian, 
applied to foreigners, suggested the meaning 
we are apt to give it. It gathered some such 
insolence with it in the course of time ; but 
the more intellectual Greeks venerated the 
countriesfrom which they brought the elements 
of their mythology and philosophy. The 
philosopher travelled into Egypt, like a son to 
see his father. The merchant heard in Phoe- 
nicia the far-brought stories of other realms, 
which he told to his delighted countrymen. 
It is supposed, that the mortal part of Mentor 
in the Odyssey was drawn from one of these 
voyagers. When Anacharsis the Scythian 
was reproached with his native place by an 
unworthy Greek, he said, " My country may 
be a shame to me, but you are a shame to your 
country." Greece had a lofty notion of the 
Persians and the Great King, till Xerxes came 
over to teach it better, and betrayed the soft- 
ness of their skulls. 

It was the same with the Arabians, at the 
time when they had the accomplishments of 
the world to themselves ; as we see by their 
delightful tales. Everything shines with them 
in the distance, like a sunset. W^hat an ami- 
able people are their Persians ! What a 
wonderful place is the island of Serendib ! 
You would think nothing could be finer than 
the Caliph's city of Bagdat, till you hear of 
" Grand Cairo ;" and how has that epithet 
and that name towered in the imagination of 
all those, who have not had the misfortune to 
see the modern city ? Sindbad was respected, 
like Ulysses, because he had seen so many 
adventures and nations. So was Aboulfaouris 
the Great Voyager, in the Persian Tales. His 
very name sounds like a wonder. 

With many a tempest had his beard been shaken. 

It was one of the workings of the great 
Alfred's mind, to know about far-distant coun- 
tries. There is a translation by him of a book 
of geography ; and he even employed people 
to travel : a great stretch of intellectual muni- 
ficence for those times. About the same 
period, Haroun al Raschid (whom our manhood 
is startled to find almost a less real person 
than we thought him, for his very reality) 
wrote a letter to the Emperor of the West, 
Charlemagne. Here is Arabian and Italian 
romance, shaking hands in person. 

The Crusades pierced into a new world of 
remoteness. We do not know whether those 
were much benefited, who took part in them ; 



2G 



THE INDICATOR. 



but for the imaginative persons remaining at 
home, the idea of going to Palestine must 
have been like travelling into a supernatural 
world. When the campaign itself had a good 
effect, it must have been of a very fine and 
highly-tempered description. Chaucer's Knight 
had been 

Sometime with the lord of Palatie 

Agen another hethen in Turkie : 

And evermore he had a sovereign price : 

And though that he was worthy, he was wise, 

And of his port as meek as is a mayde. 

How like a return from the moon must have 
been the re-appearance of such travellers as 
Sir John Mandevile, Marco Polo, and "William 
de Rubruquis, with their news of Prester 
John, the Great Mogul, and the Great Cham 
of Tartary ! The long-lost voyager must have 
been like a person consecrated in all the 
quarters of heaven. His staff and his beard 
must have looked like relics of his former 
self. The Venetians, who were some of the 
earliest European travellers, have been re- 
marked, among their other amiable qualities, 
for their great respect for strangers. The 
peculiarity of their position, and the absence 
of so many things which are common-places to 
other countries, such as streets, horses, and 
coaches, add, no doubt, to this feeling. But a 
foolish or vain people would only feel a con- 
tempt for what they did not possess. Milton, 
in one of those favourite passages of his, in 
which he turns a nomenclature into such grand 
meaning and music, shows us whose old footing 
he had delighted to follow. How he enjoys 
the distance ; emphatically using the words 
far, farthest, and utmost! 

— Embassies from regions far remote, 

In various habits, on the Appian road, 

Or on the Emilian ; some from farthest south, 

Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, 

Meroe, Nilotick Isle ; and more to west, 

The realm of Boechus to the Black-moor sea ; 

From the Asian kings, and Parthian among these ; 

From India and the golden Chersonese, 

And utmost Indian isle Taprobane. — Parad. Reg. b. iv. 

One of the main helps to our love of remote- 
ness in general, is the associations we connect 
with it of peace and quietness. Whatever 
there may be at a distance, people feel as if 
they should escape from the worry of their 
local cares. " O that I had wings like a dove ! 
then would I fly away and be at rest." The 
word far is often used wilfully in poetry, to 
render distance still more distant. An old 
English song begins — 

In Irelande farre over the sea 
There dwelt a bonny king. 

Thomson, a Scotchman, speaking of the western 
isles of his own country, has that delicious 
line, full of a dreary yet lulling pleasure ; — 

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles, 
Placed far amid the melancholy main. 



In childhood, the total ignorance of the 
world, especially when we are brought up in 
some confined spot, renders everything beyond 
the bounds of our dwelling a distance and a 
romance. Mr. Lamb, in his Recollections of 
Christ's Hospital, says that he remembers when 
some half-dozen of his school-fellows set off, 
" without map, card, or compass, on a serious 
expedition to find out Philip Quarll's Island." 
We once encountered a set of boys as romantic. 
It was at no greater distance than at the foot 
of a hill near Hampstead ; yet the spot was so 
perfectly Cisalpine to them, that two of them 
came up to us with looks of hushing eager- 
ness, and asked " whether, on the other side 
of that hill, there were not robbers ;" to which, 
the minor adventurer of the two added, " and 
some say serpents." They had all got bows 
and arrows, and were evidently hovering 
about the place, betwixt daring and apprehen- 
sion, as on the borders of some wild region. 
We smiled to think which it was that hus- 
banded their suburb wonders to more advan- 
tage, they or we : for while they peopled the 
place with robbers and serpents, we were 
peopling it with sy Ivans and fairies. 

" So was it when my life began ; 
So is it now I am a man ; 
So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die ! 
The child is father to the man ; 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety." 



XIX.— A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER. 

A man who does not contribute his quota 
of grim story now-a-days, seems hardly to be 
free of the republic of letters. He is bound to 
wear a death's-head, as part of his insignia. 
If he does not frighten everybody, he is nobody. 
If he does not shock the ladies, what can be 
expected of him ? 

We confess we think very cheaply of these 
stories in general. A story, merely horrible 
or even awful, which contains no sentiment 
elevating to the human heart and its hopes, is 
a mere appeal to the least judicious, least 
healthy, and least masculine of our passions, — 
fear. They whose attention can be gravely 
arrested by it, are in a fit state to receive any 
absurdity with respect ; and this is the reason, 
why less talents are required to enforce it, than 
in any other species of composition. With 
this opinion of such things, we may be allowed 
to say, that we would undertake to write a 
dozen horrible stories in a day, all of which 
should make the common worshippers of power, 
who were not in the very healthiest condition, 
turn pale. We would tell of Haunting Old 
Women, and Knocking Ghosts, and Solitary 
Lean Hands, and Empusas on One Leg, and 
Ladies growing Longer and Longer, and Horrid 



A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER. 



27 



Eyes meeting us through Key-holes, and 
Plaintive Heads, and Shrieking Statues, and 
Shocking Anomalies of Shape, and Things 
which when seen drove people mad ; and In- 
digestion knows what besides. But who would 
measure talents with a leg of veal, or a German 
sausage ? 

Mere grimness is as easy as grinning ; but it 
requires something to put a handsome face on 
a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit 
in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like 
offences, particularly of blood and wounds. A 
child has a reasonable respect for a Raw-head- 
and-bloody-bones, because all images whatso- 
ever of pain and terror are new and fearful to 
his inexperienced age : but sufferings merely 
physical (unless sublimated like those of Phi- 
loctetes) are common-places to a grown man. 
Images, to become awful to him, must be 
removed from the grossness of the shambles. 
A death's-head was a respectable thing in the 
hands of a poring monk, or of a nun compelled 
to avoid the idea of life and society, or of a 
hermit already buried in the desert. Holbein's 
Dance of Death, in which every grinning 
skeleton leads along a man of rank, from the 
pope to the gentleman, is a good Memento 
Mori ; but there the skeletons have an air of 
the ludicrous and satirical. If we were 
threatened with them in a grave way, as spec- 
tres, we should have a right to ask how they 
could walk about without muscles. Thus 
many of the tales written by such authors as 
the late Mr. Lewis, who wanted sentiment to 
give him the heart of truth, are quite puerile. 
"When his spectral nuns go about bleeding, we 
think they ought in decency to have applied 
to some ghost of a surgeon. His Little Grey 
Men, who sit munching hearts, are of a piece 
with fellows that eat cats for a wager. 

Stories that give mental pain to no purpose, 
or to very little purpose compared with the 
unpleasant ideas they excite of human nature, 
are as gross mistakes, in their way, as these, 
and twenty times as pernicious : for the latter 
become ludicrous to grown people. They ori- 
ginate also in the same extremes, of callous- 
ness, or of morbid want of excitement, as the 
others. But more of these hereafter. Our 
business at present is with things ghastly and 
ghostly. 

A ghost story, to be a good one, should unite, 
as much as possible, objects such as they are 
in life, with a preternatural spirit. And to be 
a perfect one, — at least to add to the other 
utility of excitement a moral utility, — they 
should imply some great sentiment, — some- 
thing that comes out of the next world to 
remind us of our duties in this ; or something 
that helps to carry on the idea of our humanity 
into after-life, even when we least think we 
shall take it with us. When " the buried ma- 
jesty of Denmark " revisits earth to speak to 
his son Hamlet, he comes armed, as he used to 



be, in his complete steel. His visor is raised ; 
and the same fine face is there ; only, in spite 
of his punishing errand and his own sufferings, 
with 

A countenance more in sorrow than in anger. 

When Donne the poet, in his thoughtful 
eagerness to reconcile life and death, had a 
figure of himself painted in a shroud, and laid 
by his bedside in a coffin, he did a higher thing 
than the monks and hermits with their skulls. 
It was taking his humanity with him into the 
other world, not affecting to lower the sense 
of it by regarding it piecemeal or in the frame- 
work. Burns, in his Tarn O'&hanter, shows the 
dead in their coffins after the same fashion. 
He does not lay bare to us their skeletons or 
refuse, things with which we can connect no 
sympathy or spiritual wonder. They still are 
flesh and body to retain the one ; yet so look 
and behave, inconsistent in their very consis- 
tency, as to excite the other. 

Coffins stood round like open presses, 
Which showed the dead in their last dresses : 
And by some devilish cantrip sleight, 
Each, in his cauld hand, held a light. 

Re-animation is perhaps the most ghastly of 
all ghastly things, uniting as it does an appear- 
ance of natural interdiction from the next 
world, with a supernatural experience of it. 
Our human consciousness is jarred out of its 
self-possession. The extremes of habit and 
newness, of common-place and astonishment, 
meet suddenly, without the kindly introduc- 
tion of death and change ; and the stranger 
appals us in proportion. When the account 
appeared the other day in the newspapers of 
the galvanized dead body, whose features as 
well as limbs underwent such contortions, 
that it seemed as if it were about to rise up, 
one almost expected to hear, for the first time, 
news of the other world. Perhaps the most 
appalling figure in Spenser is that of Maleger : 
{Fairy Queen, b. n. c. xi.) 

Upon a tygre swift and fierce he rode, 
That as the winde ran underneath his lode, 
Whiles his long legs nigh raught unto the ground : 
Full large he was of limbe, and shoulders brode, 
But of such subtile substance and unsound, 
That like a ghost he seemed, whose grave-clothes were 
unbound. 

Mr. Coleridge, in that voyage of his to the 
brink of all unutterable things, the Ancient 
Mariner (which works out however a fine sen- 
timent), does not set mere ghosts or hobgoblins 
to man the ship again, when its crew are dead ; 
but re-animates, for a while, the crew them- 
selves. There is a striking fiction of this sort 
in Sale's notes upon the Koran. Solomon dies 
during the building of the temple, but his body 
remains leaning on a staff and overlooking the 
workmen, as if it were alive ; till a worm 
gnawing through the prop, he falls down. — The 
contrast .of the appearance of humanity with 



28 



THE INDICATOR. 



something mortal or supernatural, is always 
the more terrible in proportion as it is complete. 
In the pictures of the temptations of saints 
and hermits, where the holy person is sur- 
rounded, teazed, and enticed, with devils and 
fantastic shapes, the most shocking phantasm is 
that of the beautiful woman. To return also to 
the poem above-mentioned. The most appalling 
personage in Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner 
is the Spectre-woman, who is called Life-in- 
Death. He renders the most hideous abstrac- 
tion more terrible than it could otherwise have 
been, by embodying it in its own reverse. 
K Death " not only « lives " in it ; but the " un- 
utterable " becomes uttered. To see such an 
unearthly passage end in such earthliness, 
seems to turn common-place itself into a sort 
of spectral doubt. The Mariner, after describ- 
ing the horrible calm, and the rotting sea in 
which the ship was stuck, is speaking of a 
strange sail which he descried in the distance : 

The western wave was all a-flame, 
The day was well-nigh done ! 
Almost upon the western wave 
Rested the broad bright sun ; 
When that strange ship drove suddenly 
Betwixt us and the sun. 

And straight the sun was necked with bara 
(Heaven's Mother send us grace !) 
As if through a dungeon-grate he peer'd, 
With broad and burning face. 

Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) 
How fast she neers and neers ! 
Are those her sails that glance in the sun 
Like restless gossameres ? 

Are those her ribs, through which the sun 
Did peer as through a grate ? 
And is that Woman all her crew? 
Is that a death ? and are there two ? 
Is Death that Woman's mate ? 

Her lips were red, her looks were free, 
Her locks were yellow as gold, 
Her skin was as white as leprosy, 
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she, 
Who thicks man's blood with cold. 

But we must come to Mr. Coleridge's story 
with our subtlest imaginations upon us. Now 
let us put our knees a little nearer the fire, 
and tell a homelier one about Life in Death. 
The groundwork of it is in Sandys' Commen- 
tary upon Ovid, and quoted from Sabinus*. 

A gentleman of Bavaria, of a noble family, 
was so afflicted at the death of his wife, that 
unable to bear the company of any other per- 
son, he gave himself up to a solitary way Of 
living. This was the more remarkable in him, 
as he had been a man of jovial habits, fond of 
his wine and visitors, and impatient of having 
his numerous indulgences contradicted. But 
in the same temper perhaps might be found 
the cause of his sorrow ; for though he would 
be impatient with his wife, as with others, yet 

* The Saxon Latin poet, we presume, professor of belles- 
lettres at Frankfort. We know nothing of him except 
from a biographical dictionary. 



his love for her was one of the gentlest wills 
he had ; and the sweet and unaffected face 
which she always turned upon his anger, might 
have been a thing more easy for him to trespass 
upon while living, than to forget, when dead and 
gone. His very anger towards her, compared 
with that towards others, was a relief to him. 
It was rather a wish to refresh himself in the 
balmy feeling of her patience, than to make 
her unhappy herself, or to punish her, as some 
would have done, for that virtuous contrast to 
his own vice. 

But whether he bethought himself, after her 
death, that this was a very selfish mode of 
loving ; or whether as some thought, he had 
wearied out her life with habits so contrary to 
her own ; or whether, as others reported, he 
had put it to a fatal risk by some lordly piece 
of self-will, in consequence of which she had 
caught a fever on the cold river during a night 
of festivity ; he surprised even those who 
thought that he loved her, by the extreme 
bitterness of his grief. The very mention of 
festivity, though he was patient for the first 
day or two, afterwards threw him into a pas- 
sion of rage ; but by degrees even his rage 
followed his other old habits. He was gentle, 
but ever silent. He ate and drank but suffi- 
cient to keep him alive ; and used to spend the 
greater part of the day in the spot where his 
wife was buried. 

He was going there one evening, in a very 
melancholy manner, with his eyes turned 
towards the earth, and had just entered the 
rails of the burial-ground, when he was ac- 
costed by the mild voice of somebody coining 
to meet him. " It is a blessed evening, Sir," 
said the voice. The gentleman looked up. 
Nobody but himself was allowed to be in the 
place at that hour ; and yet he saw, with as- 
tonishment, a young chorister approaching 
him. He was going to express some wonder, 
when, he said, the modest though assured look 
of the boy, and the extreme beauty of his 
countenance, which glowed in the setting sun 
before him, made an irresistible addition to 
the singular sweetness of his voice ; and he 
asked him with an involuntary calmness, and 
a gesture of respect, not what he did there, but 
what he wished. " Only to wish you all good 
things," answered the stranger, who had now 
come up, " and to give you this letter." The 
gentleman took the letter, and saw upon it, 
with a beating yet scarcely bewildered heart, 
the handwriting of his wife. He raised his 
eyes again to speak to the boy, but he was 
gone. He cast them far and near round the 
place, but there were no traces of a passenger. 
He then opened the letter ; and by the divine 
light of the setting sun, read these words : 

" To my dear husband, who sorrows for his 
wife : 
" Otto, my husband, the soul you regret so 






A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER. 



29 



is returned. You will know the truth of this, 
and be prepared with calmness to see it, by 
the divineness of the messenger, who has 
passed you. You will find me sitting in the 
public walk, praying for you ; praying, that 
you may never more give way to those gusts 
of passion, and those curses against others, 
which divided us. 

" This, with a warm hand, from the living 
Bertha." 

Otto (for such, it seems, was the gentleman's 
name) went instantly, calmly, quickly, yet with 
a sort of benumbed being, to the public walk. 
He felt, but with only a half-consciousness, as 
if he glided without a body. But all his spirit 
was awake, eager, intensely conscious. It 
seemed to him as if there had been but two 
things in the world — Life and Death ; and 
that Death was dead. All else appeared to 
have been a dream. He had awaked from a 
waking state, and found himself all eye, and 
spirit, and locomotion. He said to himself, 
once, as he went : " This is not a dream. I 
will ask my great ancestors to-morrow to my 
new bridal feast, for they are alive." Otto 
had been calm at first, but something of old 
and triumphant feelings seemed again to come 
over him. Was he again too proud and con- 
fident ? Did his earthly humours prevail 
again, when he thought them least upon him ? 
We shall see. 

The Bavarian arrived at the public walk. 
It was full of people with their wives and 
children, enjoying the beauty of the evening. 
Something like common fear came over him, 
as he went in and out among them, looking at 
the benches on each side. It happened that 
there was only one person, a lady, sitting upon 
them. She had her veil down ; and his being 
underwent a fierce but short convulsion as he 
went near her. Something had a little bafiled 
the calmer inspiration of the angel that had 
accosted him : for fear prevailed at the in- 
stant, and Otto passed on. He returned before 
he had reached the end of the walk, and ap- 
proached the lady again. She was still sitting 
in the same quiet posture, only he thought she 
looked at him. Again he passed her. On his 
second return, a grave and sweet courage came 
upon him, and in an under but firm tone of in- 
quiry, he said "Bertha?" — "I thought you 
had forgotten me," said that well-known and 
mellow voice, which he had seemed as far from 
ever hearing again as earth is from heaven. 
He took her hand, which grasped his in turn ; 
and they walked home in silence together, 
the arm, which was wound within his, giving 
warmth for warmth. 

The neighbours seemed to have a miracu- 
lous want of wonder at the lady's re-appear- 
ance. Something was said about a mock- 
funeral, and her having withdrawn from his 
company for awhile; but visitors came as 



before, and his wife returned to her house- 
hold affairs. It was only remarked that she 
always looked pale and pensive. But she 
was more kind to all, even than before ; and 
her pensiveness seemed rather the result of 
some great internal thought, than of unhappi- 



For a year or two, the Bavarian retained the 
better temper which he acquired. His for- 
tunes flourished beyond his earliest ambi- 
tion ; the most amiable as well as noble 
persons of the district were frequent visitors ; 
and people said, that to be at Otto's house, 
must be the next thing to being in heaven. 
But by degrees his self-will returned with his 
prosperity. He never vented impatience on 
his wife ; but he again began to show, that the 
disquietude it gave her to see it vented on 
others, was a secondary thing, in his mind, to 
the indulgence of it. Whether it was, that 
his grief for her loss had been rather remorse 
than affection, so he held himself secure if he 
treated her well ; or whether he was at all 
times rather proud of her, than fond ; or 
whatever was the cause Avhich again set his 
antipathies above his sympathies, certain it 
was, that his old habits returned upon him ; 
not so often indeed, but with greater violence 
and pride when they did. These were the 
only times, at which his wife was observed to 
show any ordinary symptoms of uneasiness. 

At length, one day, some strong rebuff" which 
he had received from an alienated neighbour 
threw him into such a transport of rage, that 
he gave way to the most bitter imprecations, 
crying with a loud voice — " This treatment to 
•me too! Tome! To me, who if the world 

knew all " At these words, his wife, who 

had in vain laid her hand upon his, and looked 
him with dreary earnestness in the face, sud- 
denly glided from the room. He and two or 
three who were present, were struck with a 
dumb horror. They said, she did not walk 
out, nor vanish suddenly ; but glided, as one 
who could dispense with the use of feet. 
After a moment's pause, the others proposed 
to him to follow her. He made a movement 
of despair ; but they went. There was a short 
passage, which turned to the right into her fa- 
vourite room. They knocked at the door twice 
or three times, and received no answer. At 
last, one of them gently opened it ; and looking 
in, they saw her, as they thought, standing 
before a fire, which was the only light in the 
room. Yet she stood so far from it, as rather 
to be in the middle of the room ; only the 
face was towards the fire, and she seemed 
looking upon it. They addressed her, but re- 
ceived no answer. They stepped gently 
towards her, and still received none. The 
figure stood dumb and unmoved. At last, one 
of them went round in front, and instantly fell 
on the floor. The figure was without body. 
A hollow hood was left instead of a face. 



30 



THE INDICATOR. 



The clothes were standing upright by them- 
selves. 

That room was blocked up for ever, for the 
clothes, if it might be so, to moulder away. It 
was called the Room of the Lady's Figure. 
The house, after the gentleman's death, was 
long uninhabited, and at length burnt by the 
peasants in an insurrection. As for himself, 
he died about nine months after, a gentle and 
child-like penitent. He had never stirred 
from the house since ; and nobody would ven- 
ture to go near him, but a man who had the 
reputation of being a reprobate. It was from 
this man that the particulars of the story came 
first. He would distribute the gentleman's 
alms in great abundance to any strange poor 
who would accept them ; for most of the 
neighbours held them in horror. He tried all 
he could to get the parents among them to let 
some of their little children, or a single one of 
them, go to see his employer. They said he 
even asked it one day with tears in his eyes. 
But they shuddered to think of it ; and the 
matter was not mended, when this profane 
person, in a fit of impatience, said one day that 
he would have a child of his own on purpose. 
His employer, however, died in a day or two. 
They did not believe a word he told them of 
all the Bavarian's gentleness, looking upon the 
latter as a sort of Ogre, and upon his agent as 
little better, though a good-natured-looking 
earnest kind of person. It was said many 
years after, that this man had been a friend of 
the Bavarian's when young, and had been de- 
serted by him. And the young believed it, 
whatever the old might do. 



XX— THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 

Having met in the Harleian Miscellany with 
an account of a pet thief of ours, the famous 
Du Vail, who flourished in the time of Charles 
the Second, and wishing to introduce him 
worthily to the readers, it has brought to mind 
such a number of the light-fingered gentry, his 
predecessors, that we almost feel hustled by 
the thoughts of them. Our subject, we may 
truly fear, will run away with us. We feel 
beset, like poor Tasso in his dungeon ; and are 
not sure that our paper will not suddenly be 
conveyed away from under our pen. Already 
we miss some excellent remarks, which we 
should have made in this place. If the reader 
should meet with any of that kind hereafter, 
upon the like subject,in another man's writings, 
twenty to one they are stolen from us, and 
ought to have enriched this our plundered 
exordium. He that steals an author's purse, 
may emphatically be said to steal trash ; but 

he that filches from him his good things 

Alas, we thought our subject would be running 
away with us. We must keep firm. We 



must put something heavier in our remarks, 
as the little thin Grecian philosopher used to 
put lead in his pockets, lest the wind should 
steal him. 

The more ruffianly crowd of thieves should 
go first, as pioneers ; but they can hardly be 
looked upon as progenitors of our gentle Du 
Vail ; and besides, with all their ferocity, 
some of them assume a grandeur, from stand- 
ing in the remote shadows of antiquity. There 
was the famous son, for instance, of Vulcan 
and Medusa, whom Virgil calls the dire aspect 
of half-human Cacus— Semihominis Caci facies 
dira. (iEneid, b. viii. v. 194.) He was the 
raw-head-and-bloody-bones of ancient fable. 
He lived in a cave by Mount Aventine, breath- 
ing out fiery smoke, and haunting king Evan- 
der's highway like the Apollyon of Pilgrim's 
Progress. 

Semper que recenti 

Ca?de tepebat humus ; foribusque adfixa superbis 

Ora virum tristi pendebant pallida tabo. 

The place about was ever in a plash 

Of steaming blood ; and o'er the insulting door 

Hung pallid human heads, defaced with dreary gore. 

He stole some of the cows of Hercules, and 
dragged them backwards into his cave to pre- 
vent discovery ; but the oxen happening to 
low, the cows answered them ; and the demi- 
god, detecting the miscreant in his cave, 
strangled him after a hard encounter. This 
is one of the earliest sharping tricks upon 
record. 

Autolycus, the son of Mercury (after Avhom 
Shakspeare christened his merry rogue in the 
Winter's Tale) was a thief suitable to the greater 
airiness of his origin. He is said to have per- 
formed tricks which must awake the envy 
even of horse-dealers ; for in pretending to 
return a capital horse which he had stolen, he 
palmed upon the owners a sorry jade of an 
ass ; which was gravely received by those flats 
of antiquity. Another time he went still 
farther ; for having conveyed away a hand- 
some bride, he sent in exchange an old lady 
elaborately hideous ; yet the husband did not 
find out the trick till he had got off. 

Autolycus himself, however, was outwitted 
by Sisyphus, the son of iEolus. Autolycus 
was in the habit of stealing his neighbours' 
cattle, and altering the marks upon them. } 
Among others he stole some from Sisyphus ; 
but notwithstanding his usual precautions, he j 
was astonished to find the latter come and j 
pick out his oxen, as if nothing had happened, i 
He had marked them under the hoof. Auto- J 
lycus, it seems, had the usual generosity of 
genius ; and was so pleased with this evidence 
of superior cunning, that some say he gave 
him in marriage his daughter Anticlea, who 
was afterwards the wife of Laertes, the father 
of Ulysses. According to others, however, he 
only favoured him with his daughter's com- 
pany for a time, a fashion not yet extinct in 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



SI 



some primitive countries ; and it was a re- 
proach made against Ulysses, that Laertes was 
only his pretended, and Sisyphus his real, 
father. Sisyphus has the credit of being the 
greatest knave of antiquity. His famous 
punishment in hell, of being compelled to roll 
a stone up a hill to all eternity, and seeing it 
always go down again, is attributed by some to 
a characteristic trait, which he could not help 
playing off upon Pluto. It was supposed by 
the ancients, that a man's ghost wandered in a 
melancholy manner upon the banks of the 
Styx, as long as his corpse remained without 
burial. Sisyphus on his death-bed purposely 
charged his wife to leave him unburied ; and 
then begged Pluto's permission to go back to 
earth, on his parole, merely to punish her for 
so scandalous a neglect. Like the lawyer, 
however, who contrived to let his hat fall inside 
the door of heaven, and got St. Peter's per- 
mission to step in for it, Sisyphus would not 
return ; and so when Pluto had him again, he 
paid him for the trick with setting him upon 
this everlasting job. 

The exploits of Mercury himself, the god of 
cunning, may be easily imagined to surpass 
everything achieved byprofaner hands. Homer, 
in the hymn to his honour, has given a delight- 
ful account of his prematurity in swindling. 
He had not been born many hours before he 
stole Vulcan's tools, Mars' sword, and Jupiter's 
sceptre. He beat Cupid in a wrestling bout 
on the same day ; and Venus caressing him 
for his conquest, he returned the embrace by 
filching away her girdle. He would also have 
stolen Jupiter's thunderbolts, but was afraid of 
burning his fingers. On the evening of his 
birth-day, he drove off the cattle of Admetus, 
which Apollo was tending. The good-humoured 
god of wit endeavoured to frighten him into 
restoring them ; but could not help laughing 
when, in the midst of his threatenings, he 
found himself without his quiver. 

The history of thieves is to be found either 
in that of romance, or in the details of the 
history of cities. The latter have not come 
down to us from the ancient world, with some 
exceptions in the comic writers, immaterial to 
our present purpose, and in the loathsome 
rhetoric of Petronius. The finest thief in old 
history is the pirate who made that famous 
answer to Alexander, in which he said that the 
conqueror was only the mightier thief of the 
two. The story of the thieving architect in 
Herodotus we will tell another time. We can 
call to mind no other thieves in the Greek and 
Latin writers (always excepting political ones) 
except some paltry fellows who stole napkins 
at dinner ; and the robbers in Apuleius, the 
precursors of those in Gil Bias. When we 
come, however, to the times of the Arabians 
and of chivalry, they abound in all their glory, 
both great and small. Who among us does 
not know by heart the story of the never-to-be- 



forgotten Forty Thieves, with their treasure in 
the green wood, their anxious observer, their 
magical opening of the door, their captain, 
their concealment in the jars, and the scalding 
oil, that, as it were, extinguished them groan- 
ing, one by one ? Have we not all ridden 
backwards and forwards with them to the wood 
a hundred times ? — watched them, with fear 
and trembling, from the tree ? — sewn up, 
blindfolded, the four quarters of the dead body ? 
— and said, a Open Sesame," to every door at 
school? May we ride with them again and 
again ; or we shall lose our appetite for some 
of the best things in the world. 

We pass over those interlopers in our English 
family, the Danes ; as well as Rollo the Norman, 
and other freebooters, who only wanted less 
need of robbery, to become respectable con- 
querors. In fact, they did so, as they got on. 
We have also no particular worthy to select 
from among that host of petty chieftains, who 
availed themselves of their knightly castles 
and privileges, to commit all sorts of unchival- 
rous outrages. These are the giants of modern 
romance ; and the Veglios, Malengins, and 
Pinabellos, of Pulci, Spenser, and Ariosto. 
They survived in the petty states of Italy a 
long while ; gradually took a less solitary, 
though hardly less ferocious shape, among the 
fierce political partisans recorded by Dante ; 
and at length became represented by the men 
of desperate fortunes, who make such a figure, 
between the gloomy and the gallant, in Mrs. 
Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. The breaking 
up of the late kingdom of Italy, with its depend- 
encies, has again revived them in some degree ; 
but not, we believe, in any shape above common 
robbery. The regular modern thief seems to 
make his appearance for the first time in the 
imaginary character of Brunello, as described 
by Boiardo and Ariosto. He is a fellow that 
steals every valuable that comes in his way. 
The way in which he robs Sacripant, king of 
Circassia, of his horse, has been ridiculed by 
Cervantes ; if indeed he did not rather repeat 
it with great zest : for his use of the theft is 
really not such a caricature as in Boiardo and 
his great follower. While Sancho is sitting 
lumpishly asleep upon the back of his friend 
Dapple, Gines de Passamonte, the famous thief, 
comes and gently withdraws the donkey from 
under him, leaving the somniculous squire 
propped upon the saddle with four sticks. His 
consternation on waking may be guessed. But. 
in the Italian poets, the Circassian prince has 
only fallen into a deep meditation, when Bru- 
nello draws away his steed. Ariosto appears 
to have thought this extravagance a hazardous 
one, though he could not deny himself the 
pleasure of repeating it ; for he has made 
Sacripant blush, when called upon to testify 
how the horse was stolen from him. (Orlando 
Furio. lib. xxvu. st. 84.) 

In the Italian Novels and the old French 



32 



THE 1NDICAT0B, 



Tales, are a variety of extremely amusing 
stories of thieves, all most probably founded 
on fact. We will give a specimen as we go, 
by way of making this article the completer. 
A doctor of laws in Bologna had become rich 
enough, by scraping money together, to indulge 
himself in a grand silver cup, which he sent 
home one day to his wife from the goldsmith's. 
There were two sharping fellows prowling 
about that day for a particular object ; and 
getting scent of the cup, they laid their heads 
together, to contrive how they might indulge 
themselves in it instead. One of them accord- 
ingly goes to a fishmonger's, and buys a fine 
lamprey, which he takes to the doctor's wife, 
with her husband's compliments, and he would 
bring a company of his brother doctors with 
him to dinner, requesting in the meantime 
that she would send back the cup by the bearer, 
as he had forgotten to have his arms engraved 
upon it. The good lady, happy to obey all 
these pleasing impulses on the part of master 
doctor, takes in the fish, and sends out the cup, 
with equal satisfaction ; and sets about getting 
the dinner ready. The doctor comes home at 
his usual hour, and finding his dinner so much 
better than ordinary, asks with an air of 
wonder, where was the necessity of going to 
that expense : upon which the wife, putting on 
an air of wonder in her turn, and proud of 
possessing the new cup, asks him where are 
all those brother doctors, whom he said he 
should bring with him. "What does the fool 
mean ?" said the testy old gentleman. "Mean !" 
rejoined the wife — " what does this mean ?" 
pointing to the fish. The doctor looked down 
with his old eyes at the lamprey. " God 
knows," said he, " Avhat it means. I am sure 
I don't know what it means more than any 
j other fish, except that I shall have to pay a 
, pretty sum for every mouthful you eat of it." 
— " Why, it was your own doing, husband," 
said the wife ; " and you will remember it, 
\ perhaps, when you recollect that the same man 
that brought me the fish, was to take away the 
cup to have your name engraved upon it." At 
this the doctor started back, with his eyes as 
wide open as the fish's, exclaiming, " And you 
gave it him, did you ?" — "To be sure I did," 
returned the good housewife. The old doctor 
here began a passionate speech, which he sud- 
denly broke off ; and after stamping up and 
down the room, and crying out that he was an 
undone advocate, ran quivering out into the 
street like one frantic, asking everybody if he 
had seen a man with a lamprey. The two 
rogues were walking all this time in the neigh- 
bourhood ; and seeing the doctor set off, in his 
frantic fit, to the goldsmith's, and knowing that 
he who brought the lamprey had been well 
disguised, they began to ask one another, in 
the jollity of their triumph, what need there 
was for losing a good lamprey, because they 
had gained a cup. The other therefore went 



to the doctor's house, and putting on a face of 
good news, told the wife that the cup was 
found. " Master doctor," said he, " bade me 
come and tell you that it was but a joke of 
your old friend What's-his name." — "Castel- 
lani, I warrant me," said the wife, with a face 
broad with delight. "The same," returned he : 
— " master doctor says that Signor Castellani, 
and the other gentlemen he spoke of, are wait- 
ing for you at the Signor's house, where they 
purpose to laugh away the choler they so 
merrily raised, with a good dinner and wine, 
and to that end they have sent me for the 
lamprey." — " Take it in God's name," said the 
good woman ; " I am heartily glad to see it go 
out of the house, and shall follow it myself 
speedily." So saying, she gave him the fine 
hot fish, with some sauce, between two dishes ; 
and the knave, who felt already round the 
corner with glee, slid it under his cloak, and 
made the best of his way to his companion, who 
lifted up his hands and eyes at sight of him, 
and asked twenty questions in a breath, and 
chuckled, and slapped his thigh, and snapped 
his fingers for joy, to think what a pair of fools 
two rogues had to do with. Little did the 
poor despairing doctor, on his return home, 
guess what they were saying of him as he 
passed the wall of the house in which they 
were feasting. "Heyday!" cried the wife, 
smiling all abroad, as she saw him entering, 
"what, art thou come to fetch me then, bone 
of my bone ? Well ; if this isn't the gallantest 
day I have seen many a year ! It puts me in 
mind — it puts me in mind" Here the chirp- 
ing old lady was about to remind the doctor of 
the days of his youth, holding out her arms and 
raising her quivering voice, when {we shudder 
to relate) she received a considerable cuff on 
the left cheek. " You make me mad," cried 
the doctor, " with your eternal idiotical non- 
sense. What do you mean by coming to fetch 
you, and the gallantest day of your life ? May 
the devil fetch you, and me, and that invisible 
fiend that stole the cup." — " What ! " exclaimed 
the wife, suddenly changing her tone from a 
vociferous complaint which she had unthink- 
ingly set up, " did you send nobody then for 
the lamprey ? " Here the doctor cast his eyes 
upon the bereaved table; and unable to bear 
the shame of this additional loss, however 
trivial, began tearing his hair and beard, and 
hopping about the room, giving his wife a new 
and scandalous epithet at every step, as if he 
was dancing to a catalogue of her imperfections. 
The story shook all the shoulders in Bologna 
for a month after. 

As we find, by the length to which this 
article has already reached, that we should 
otherwise be obliged to compress our recollec- 
tions of Spanish, French, and English thieves, 
into a compass that would squeeze them into 
the merest dry notices, we will postpone them 
at once to our next number: and relate 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



33 



another story from the same Italian novelist 
that supplied our last*. Our author is Mas- 
succio of Salerno, a novelist who disputes with 
Bandello the rank next in popularity to Boc- 
caccio. We have not the original by us, and 
must be obliged to an English work for the 
groundwork of our story, as we have been to 
Paynter's Palace of Pleasure for the one just 
related. But we take the liberty usual with 
the repeaters of these stories ; we retain the 
incidents, but tell them in our own way, and 
imagine what might happen in the intervals. 

Two Neapolitan sharpers, having robbed a 
Genoese merchant of his purse, make the best 
of their way to Sienna, where they arrive 
during the preaching of St. Bernardin. One 
of them attends a sermon with an air of con- 
spicuous modesty and devotion, and afterwards 
waits upon the preacher, and addresses him 
thus : a Reverend father, you see before you 
a man, poor indeed, but honest. I do not 
mean to boast ; God knows, I have no reason. 
Who upon earth has reason, unless it be one 
who will be the last to boast, like yourself, 
holy father?" Here the saintly orator shook 
his head. "I do not mean," resumed the 
stranger, " to speak even of the reverend and 
illustrious Bernardin, but as of a man among 
men. For my part, I am, as it were, a creep- 
ing thing among them ; and yet I am honest. 
If I have any virtue, it is that. I crawl right 
onward in my path, looking neither to the 
right nor to the left ; and yet I have my 
temptations. Reverend father, I have found 
this purse. I will not deny, that being often 
in want of the common necessaries of life, and 
having been obliged last night, in particular, 
to sit down faint at the city gates, for want of 
my ordinary crust and onion, which I had 
given to one (God help him) still worse off 
than myself, I did cast some looks— I did, I 
say, just open the purse, and cast a wistful 
eye at one of those shining pieces, that lay 
one over the other inside, with something like 
a wish that I could procure myself a meal 
with it, unknown to the lawful proprietor. 
But my conscience, thank Heaven, prevailed. 
I have to make two requests to you, reverend 
father. First, that you will absolve me for 
this my offence; and second, that you will 
be pleased to mention in one of your dis- 
courses, that a poor sinner from Milan, on his 
road to hear them, has found a purse, and 
would willingly restore it to the right owner. 
I would fain give double the contents of it to 
find him out ; but then, what can I do ? All 
the wealth I have consists in my honesty. 
Be pleased, most illustrious father, to mention 

* In the original edition of the Indicator this article 
was divided into three numbers. Perhaps it would have 
been better had the division been retained : but per- 
plexities occur in hastily correcting a work for a new 
edition, which the reader will have the goodness to 
excuse. 



this in your discourse, as modestly as becomes 
my nothingness; and to add especially, that 
the purse was found on the road from Milan, 
lying, miraculously as it were, upon a sunny 
bank, open to the view of all, under an olive- 
tree, not far from a little fountain, the plea- 
sant noise of which peradventure had invited 
the owner to sleep." The good father, at 
hearing this detail, smiled at the anxious 
sincerity of the poor pilgrim, and, giving him 
the required absolution, promised to do his 
utmost to bring forth the proprietor. In his 
next sermon, he accordingly dwelt with such 
eloquence on the opportunities thrown in the 
way of the rich who lose purses to behave 
nobly, that his congregation several times half 
rose from their seats out of enthusiasm, and 
longed for some convenient loss of property, 
that might enable them to show their dis- 
interestedness. At the conclusion of it, how- 
ever, a man stepped forward, and said, that 
anxious as he was to do justice to the finder 
of the purse, which he knew to be his the 
moment he saw it (only he was loth to inter- 
rupt the reverend father), he had claims upon 
him at home, in the person of his wife and 
thirteen children, — fourteen perhaps, he might 
now say, — which, to his great sorrow, pre- 
vented him from giving the finder more than 
a quarter of a piece ; this however he offered 
him with the less scruple, since he saw the 
seraphic disposition of the reverend preacher 
and his congregation, who he had no doubt 
would make ample amends for this involuntary 
deficiency on the part of a poor family man, 
the whole portion of whose wife and children 
might be said to be wrapped up in that purse. 
His sleep under the olive-tree had been his 
last for these six nights (here the other man 
said, with a tremulous joy of acknowledgment, 
that it was indeed just six nights since he had 
found it); and Heaven only knew when he 
should have had another, if his children's 
bread, so to speak, had not been found again." 
With these words, the sharper (for such, of 
course, he was) presented the quarter of a 
piece to his companion, who made all but a 
prostration for it ; and hastened with the purse 
out of the church. The other man's circum- 
stances were then inquired into, and as he 
was found to have almost as many children 
as the purse-owner, and no possessions at all, 
as he said, but his honesty, — all his children 
being equally poor and pious, — a considerable 
subscription was raised for him ; so large 
indeed, that on the appearance of a new 
claimant next day, the pockets of the good 
people were found empty. This was no other 
than the Genoese merchant, who having turned 
back on his road when he missed his purse, 
did not stop till he came to Sienna, and heard 
the news of the day before. Imagine the 
feelings of . the deceived people ! Saint Ber- 
nardin was convinced that the two cheats 



34 



THE INDICATOR. 



<vere devils in disguise. The resident canon 
had thought pretty nearly as much all along, 
but had held his tongue, and now hoped it 
would be a lesson to people not to listen to 
everybody who could talk, especially to the 
neglect of Saint Antonio's monastery. As to 
the people themselves, they thought variously. 
Most of them were mortified at having been 
cheated; and some swore they never would 
be cheated again, let appearances be what 
they might. Others thought that this was a 
resolution somewhat equivocal, and more con- 
venient than happy. For our parts, we think 
the last were right : and this reminds us of a 
true English story, more good than striking, 
which we heard a short while ago from a 
friend. He knew a man of rugged manners, 
but good heart (not that the two things, as a 
lover of parentheses will say, are at all bound 
to go together), who had a wife somewhat 
given to debating with hackney-coachmen, and 
disputing acts of settlement respecting half- 
miles, and quarter-miles, and abominable addi- 
tional sixpences. The good housewife was 
lingering at the door, and exclaiming against 
one of these monstrous charioteers, whose 
hoarse low voice was heard at intervals, full 
of lying protestations and bad weather, when 
the husband called out from a back-room, 
" Never mind there, never mind : — let her be 
cheated ; let her be cheated." 

This is a digression ; but it is as well to 
introduce it, in order to take away a certain 
bitterness out of the mouth of the other's 
moral. 

"We now come to a very unromantic set of 
rogues ; the Spanish ones. In a poetical sense, 
at least, they are unromantic ; though doubt- 
less the mountains of Spain have seen as 
picturesque vagabonds in their time as any. 
There are the robbers in Gil Bias, who have, 
at least, a respectable cavern, and loads of 
polite superfluities. Who can forget the lofty- 
named Captain Rolando, with his sturdy height 
and his whiskers, showing with a lighted torch 
his treasure to the timid stripling, Gil Bias ? 
The most illustrious theft in Spanish story is 
one recorded of no less a person than the fine 
old national hero, the Cid. As the sufferers 
were Jews, it might be thought that his con- 
science would not have hurt him in those 
days; but "My Cid" was a kind of early 
soldier in behalf of sentiment ; and though he 
went to work roughly, he meant nobly and 
kindly. "God knows," said he, on the present 
occasion, "I do this thing more of necessity 
than of wilfulness ; but by God's help I shall 
redeem all." The case was this. The Cid, 
who was too good a subject to please his 
master, the king, had quarrelled with him, or 
rather, had been banished; and nobody was 
to give him house-room or food. A number 
of friends, however, folio v/ed him ; and by the 
help of his nephew, Martin Antolinez, he pro- 



posed to raise some money. Martin accord- 
ingly negotiated the business with a couple 
of rich Jews, who, for a deposit of two chests 
full of spoil, which they were not to open for 
a year, on account of political circumstances, 
agreed to advance six hundred marks. " Well, 
then," said Martin Antolinez, "ye see that the 
night is advancing ; the Cid is in haste, give 
us the marks." "This is not the way of busi- 
ness," said they; "we must take first, and 
then give." Martin accordingly goes with 
them to the Cid, who in the meantime has 
filled a couple of heavy chests with sand. The 
Cid smiled as they kissed his hand, and said, 
" Ye see I am going out of the land because 
of the king's displeasure; but I shall leave 
something with ye." The Jews made a suit- 
able answer, and were then desired to take 
the chests; but, though strong men, they 
could not raise them from the ground. This 
put them in such spirits, that after telling out 
the six hundred marks (which Don Martin 
took without weighing), they offered the Cid 
a present of a fine red skin ; and upon Don 
Martin's suggesting that he thought his own 
services in the business merited a pair of hose, 
they consulted a minute with each other, in 
order to do everything judiciously, and then 
gave him money enough to buy, not only the 
hose, but a rich doublet and good cloak into 
the bargain*. 

The regular sharping rogues, however, that 
abound in Spanish books of adventure, have 
one species of romance about them of a very 
peculiar nature. It may be called, we fear, 
as far as Spain is concerned, a "romance of 
real life." We allude to the absolute want 
and hunger which is so often the original of 
their sin. A vein of this craving nature runs 
throughout most of the Spanish novels. In 
other countries theft is generally represented 
as the result of an abuse of plenty, or of some 
other kind of profligacy, or absolute ruin. But 
it seems to be an understood thing, that to be 
poor in Spain is to be in want of the com- 
monest necessaries of life. If a poor man, here 
and there, happens not to be in so destitute 
a state as the rest, he thinks himself bound 
to maintain the popular character for an appe- 
tite, and manifests the most prodigious sense 
of punctuality and anticipation in all matters 
relating to meals. Who ever thinks of Sancho, 
and does not think of ten minutes before 
luncheon ? Don Quixote, on the other hand, 
counts it ungenteel and undignified to be 
hungry. The cheat who flatters Gil Bias 

* See Mr. Southey's excellent compilation entitled The 
Chronicles of the Cid, book iii. sec. 21. The version at the 
end of the hook, attributed to Mr. Hookham Frere, of a 
passage out of the Poema del Cid, is the most native and 
terse bit of translation we ever met with. It rides along, 
like the Cid himself on horseback, with an infinite mix- 
ture of ardour and self-possession; bending, when it 
chooses, with grace, or bearing down everything with 
mastery. 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



Zb 



reckons himself entitled to be insultingly tri- 
umphant, merely because he has got a dinner 
out of him. 

Of all these ingenious children of necessity, 
whose roguery has been sharpened by per- 
petual want, no wit was surely ever kept 
at so subtle and fierce an edge as that of 
the never-to-be-decently-treated Lazarillo de 
Tormes. If we ourselves had not been at a 
sort of monastic school, and known the beati- 
tude of dry bread and a draught of spring- 
water, his history would seem to inform us, 
for the first time, what hunger was. His cun- 
ning so truly keeps pace with it, that he seems 
recompensed for the wants of his stomach by 
the abundant energies of his head. One-half 
of his imagination is made up of dry bread 
and scraps, and the other of meditating how 
to get at them. Every thought of his mind 
and every feeling of his affection coalesces 
and tends to one point with a ventripetal 
force. It was said of a contriving lady, that 
she took her very tea by stratagem. Lazarillo 
is not so lucky. It is enough for him, if by a 
train of the most ingenious contrivances, he 
can lay successful siege to a crust. To rout 
some broken victuals ; to circumvent an onion 
or so, extraordinary, is the utmost aim of his 
ambition . An ox-foot is his beau ideal. He 
has as intense and circuitous a sense of a 
piece of cheese, as a mouse at a trap. He 
swallows surreptitious crumbs with as much 
zest as a young servant-girl does a plate of 
preserves. But to his story. He first serves 
a blind beggar, with whom he lives miserably, 
except when he commits thefts, which subject 
him to miserable beatings. He next lives 
with a priest, and finds his condition worse. 
His third era of esuriency takes place in the 
house of a Spanish gentleman ; and here he is 
worse off than ever. The reader wonders, as 
he himself did, how he can possibly ascend to 
this climax of starvation. To overreach a 
blind beggar might be thought easy. The 
reader will judge by a specimen or two. The 
old fellow used to keep his mug of liquor 
between his legs, that Lazarillo might not 
touch it without his knowledge. He did, 
however ; and the beggar discovering it, took 
to holding the mug in future by the handle. 
Lazarillo then contrives to suck some of the 
liquor off with a reed, till the beggar defeats 
this contrivance by keeping one hand upon 
the vessel's mouth. His antagonist upon this 
makes a hole near the bottom of the mug, 
filling it up with wax, and so tapping the can 
with as much gentleness as possible, whenever 
his thirst makes him bold. This stratagem 
threw the blind man into despair. He " used 
to swear and domineer," and wish both the 
pot and its contents at the devil. The follow- 
ing account of the result is a specimen of the 
English translation of the work, which is done 
with great tact and spirit, we know not by 



whom, but it is worthy of De Foe. Lazarillo 
is supposed to tell his adventures himself. 
11 ' You won't accuse me any more, I hope,' 
cried I, ' of drinking your wine *, after all the 
fine precautions you have taken to prevent it?' 
To that he said not a word ; but feeling all 
about the pot, he at last unluckily discovered 
the hole, which dissembling at that time, he 
let me alone till next day at dinner. Not 
dreaming, my reader must know, of the old 
man's malicious stratagem, but getting in 
between his legs, according to my wonted 
custom, and receiving into my mouth the 
distilling dew, and pleasing myself with the 
success of my own ingenuity, my eyes upward, 
but half shut, the furious tyrant, taking up 
the sweet, but hcvrd pot, with both his hands, flung 
it down again with all his force upon my face ; 
with the violence of which blow, imagining 
the house had fallen upon my head, I lay 
sprawling without any sentiment or judgment ; 
my forehead, nose, and mouth, gushing out of 
blood, and the latter full of broken teeth, and 
broken pieces of the can. From that time 
forward, I ever abominated the monstrous old j 
churl, and in spite of all his flattering stories, ! 
could easily observe how my punishment j 
tickled the old rogue's fancy. He washed my , 
sores with wine; and with a smile, 'What i 
sayest thou,' quoth he, 'Lazarillo? the thing | 
that hurt thee, now restores thee to health. 
Courage, my boy.' But all his raillery could 
not make me change my mind." 

At another time, a countryman giving them i 
a cluster of grapes, the old man, says Laza- 
rilibj "would needs take that opportunity to j 
show me a little kindness, after he had been i 
chiding and beating me the whole day before. 
So setting ourselves down by a hedge, ' Come ; 
hither, Lazarillo,' quoth he, l and let us enjoy 
ourselves a little, and eat these raisins to- 
gether ; which that we may share like brothers, J 
do you take but one at a time, and be sure j 
not to cheat me, and I promise you, for my j 
part, I shall take no more.' That I readily ; 
agreed to, and so we began our banquet ; but 
at the very second time he took a couple, j 
believing, I suppose, that I would do the same. ! 
And finding he had shown me the way, I made 
no scruple all the while to take two, three, or 
four at a time ; sometimes more and sometimes 
less, as conveniently I could. When we had 
done, the old man shook his head, and hold- ' 
ing the stalk in his hand, ' Thou hast cheated 
me, Lazarillo,' quoth he, * for I could take my 
oath, that thou hast taken three at a time.' — 
e W T ho, I ! I beg your pardon,' quoth I, ' my 
conscience is as dear to me as another.' — 
'Pass that jest upon another,' answered the 
old fox, ' you saw me take two at a time with- 
out complaining of it, and therefore you took 
three.' At that I could hardly forbear laugh- 

* The reader is to understand a common southern wine, 
very cheap. 

d 2 



3fi 



THE INDICATOR. 



ing ; and at the same time admired the just- 
ness of his reasoning." Lazarillo at length 
quitted the service of the old hard-hearted 
miser, and revenged himself upon him at the 
same time, in a very summary manner. They 
were returning home one day on account of 
bad weather, when they had to cross a kennel 
which the rain had swelled to a little torrent. 
The beggar was about to jump over it as well 
as he could, when Lazarillo persuaded him to 
go a little lower down the stream, because 
there was a better crossing ; that is, there was 
a stone pillar on the other side, against which 
he knew the blind old fellow would nearly 
dash his brains out. a He was mightily pleased 
with my advice. 'Thou art in the right on it, 
good boy,' quoth he, ' and I love thee with all 
my heart, Lazarillo. Lead me to the place 
thou speakest of ; the water is very dangerous 
in winter, and especially to have one's feet 
wet.' And again — ' Be sure to set me in the 
right place, Lazarillo,' quoth he; 'and then 
do thou go over first.' I obeyed his orders, 
and set him exactly before the pillar, and so 
leaping over, posted myself behind it, looking 
upon him as a man would do upon a mad bull. 
' Now your jump,' quoth I ; { and you may get 
over to rights, without ever touching the 
water.' I had scarce done speaking, when 
the old man, like a ram that's fighting, ran 
three steps backwards, to take his start with 
the greater vigour, and so his head came with 
a vengeance against the stone pillar, which 
made him fallback into the kennel half dead." 
Lazarillo stops a moment to triumph over him 
with insulting language; and then, says he, 
" resigning my blind, bruised, wet, old, cross, 
cunning master to the care of the mob that 
was gathered about him, I made the best of 
my heels, without ever looking about, till I 
had got the town-gate upon my back; and 
thence marching on a merry pace, I arrived 
before night at Torrigo." 

At the house of the priest, poor Lazarillo 
gets worse off than before, and is obliged to 
resort to the most extraordinary shifts to 
arrive at a morsel of bread. At one time, he 
gets a key of a tinker, and opening the old 
trunk in which the miser kept his bread (a 
sight, he says, like the opening of heaven), he 
takes small pieces out of three or four, in 
imitation of a mouse ; which so convinces the 
old hunks that the mice and rats have been at 
them, that he is more liberal of the bread than 
usual. He lets him have in particular "the 
parings above the parts where he thought the 
mice had been." Another of his contrivances 
is to palm off his pickings upon a serpent, 
with which animal a neighbour told the priest 
that his house had been once haunted. Laza- 
rillo, who had been used when he lived with 
the beggar to husband pieces of money in his 
mouth (substituting some lesser coin in the 
blind man's hand, when people gave him any 



thing), now employs the same hiding-place for 
his key; but whistling through it unfortu- 
nately one night, as he lay breathing hard in 
his sleep, the priest concludes he has caught 
the serpent, and going to Lazarillo's bed with 
a broomstick, gives him at a venture such a 
tremendous blow on the head, as half murders 
him. The key is then discovered, and the 
poor fellow turned out of doors. 

He is now hired by a lofty-looking hidalgo ; 
and follows him home, eating a thousand good 
things by anticipation. They pass through 
the markets however to no purpose. The 
squire first goes to church too, and spends an 
unconscionable time at mass. At length they 
arrive at a dreary, ominous-looking house, and 
ascend into a decent apartment, where the 
squire, after shaking his cloak, and blowing 
off the dust from a stone seat, lays it neatly 
down, and so makes a cushion of it to sit 
upon. There is no other furniture in the 
room, nor even in the neighbouring rooms, 
except a bed " composed of the anatomy of an 
old hamper." The truth is, the squire is as 
poor as Lazarillo, only too proud to own it ; 
and so he starves both himself and his servant 
at home, and then issues gallantly forth of a 
morning, with his Toledo by his side, and a 
countenance of stately satisfaction ; returning 
home every day about noon with " a starched 
body, reaching out his neck like a greyhound." 
Lazarillo had not been a day in the house, 
before he found out how matters went. He 
was beginning, in his despair of a dinner, to 
eat some scraps of bread which had been 
given him in the morning, when the squire 
observing him, asked what he was about. 
"Come hither, boy," said he, "what's that 
thou art eating?" — "I went," says Lazarillo, 
"and showed him three pieces of bread, of 
which taking away the best, * Upon my faith,' 
quoth he, ' this bread seems to be very good.' 
— * 'Tis too stale and hard, Sir,' said I, * to be 
good.' — 'I swear 'tis very good,' said the squire; 
' Who gave it thee ? Were their hands clean 
that gave it thee?' — ' I took it without asking 
any questions, Sir,' answered I, * and you see 
I eat it as freely.' — ' Pray God it may be so,' 
answered the miserable squire; and so putting 
the bread to his mouth, he eat it with no less 
appetite than I did mine; adding to every 
mouthful, ' Gadzooks, this bread is excel- 
lent.' " 

Lazarillo in short here finds the bare table 
so completely turned upon him, that he is 
forced to become provider for his master as 
well as himself ; which he does by fairly going 
out every day and begging ; the poor squire 
winking at the indignity, though not without 
a hint at keeping the connexion secret. The 
following extract shall be our climax, which 
it may well be, the hunger having thus 
ascended into the ribs of Spanish aristocracy. 
Lazarillo, one lucky day, has an ox-foot and 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



3, 



some tripe given him by a butcher- woman. 
On coming home with his treasure, he finds 
the hidalgo impatiently walking up and down, 
and fears he shall have a scolding for staying 
so long ; but the squire merely asks where he 
has been, and receives the account with an 
irrepressible air of delight. "I sate down," 
says Lazarillo, "upon the end of the stone 
seat, and began to eat that he might fancy I 
was feasting ; and observed, without seeming 
to take notice, that his eye was fixed upon my 
skirt, which was all the plate and table that I 
had. 

" May God pity me as I had compassion on that 
poor squire : daily experience made me sensible 
of his trouble. I did not know whether I 
should invite him, for since he had told me he 
had dined, I thought he would make a point 
of honour to refuse to eat ; but in short, being 
very desirous to supply his necessity, as I had 
done the day before, and which I was then 
much better in a condition to do, having already 
sufficiently stuffed my own guts, it was not 
long before an opportunity fairly offered itself ; 
for he taking occasion to come near me in his 
walks, ( Lazarillo,' quoth he (as soon as he 
observed me begin to eat), ' I never saw any- 
body eat so handsomely as thee ; a body can 
scarce see thee fall to work without desiring 
to bear thee company ; let their stomachs be 
never so full, or their mouth be never so much 
out of taste.' Faith, thought I to myself, with 
such an empty belly as yours, my own mouth 
would water at a great deal less. 

" But finding he was come where I wished 
him : ' Sir,' said I, 'good stuff makes a good 
workman. This is admirable bread, and here's 
an ox-foot so nicely dressed and so well-season- 
ed, that anybody would delight to taste of it.' 

" ' How ! ' cried the squire, interrupting me, 
' an ox-foot ? ' — * Yes, sir,' said I, * an ox-foot.' 
— { Ah ! then,' quoth he, ' thou hast in my opinion 
the delicatest bit in Spain ; there being neither 
partridge, pheasant, nor any other thing that I 
like nearly so well as that.' 

« i Will you please to try, sir ?' said I (putting 
the ox-foot in his hand, with two good morsels 
of bread) : * when you have tasted it, you will 
be convinced that it is a treat for a king, 'tis 
so well dressed and seasoned.' 

"Upon that, sitting down by my side, he 
began to eat, or rather to devour, what I had 
given him, so that the bones could hardly 
escape. ' Oh ! the excellent bit,' did he cry, 
1 that this would be with a little garlic !' Ha ! 
thought I to myself, how hastily thou eatest 
it without sauce. ' Gad,' said the squire, ' I 
have eaten this as heartily as if I had not 
tasted a bit of victuals to-day :' which I did 
very readily believe. 

"He then called for the pitcher with the 
water, which was as full as I had brought it 
home ; so you may guess whether he had had 
any. When his squireship had drank, he 



civilly invited me to do the like ; and thus 
ended our feast." 

We hope the reader is as much amused with 
this prolongation of the subject as ourselves, 
for we are led on insensibly by these amusing 
thieves, and find we have more to write upon 
them, before we have done. We must give 
another specimen or two of the sharping 
Spaniard, out of Quevedo. The Adventures, 
by the way, of Lazarillo de Tonnes, were 
written in the sixteenth century by a Spanish 
gentleman, apparently of illustrious family, 
Don Diego de Mendoza, who was sometime 
ambassador at Venice. This renders the 
story of the hidalgo still more curious. Not 
that the author perhaps ever felt the proud 
but condescending pangs which he describes ; 
this is not necessary for a man of imagination. 
He merely meant to give a hint to the poorer 
gentry not to overdo the matter on the side of 
loftiness, for their own sakes ; and hunger, 
whether among the proud or the humble, was 
too national a thing not to be entered into by 
his statistic apprehension. 

The most popular work connected with 
sharping adventures is Gril Bias, which, though 
known to us as a French production, seems 
unquestionably to have originated in the 
country where the scene is laid. It is a work 
exquisitely easy and true ; but somehow we 
have* no fancy for the knaves in it. They 
are of too smooth, sneaking, and safe a cast. 
They neither bespeak one's sympathy by 
necessity, nor one's admiration by daring. 
We except, of course, the robbers before- 
mentioned, who are a picturesque patch in 
the world, like a piece of rough poetry. 

Of the illustrious Guzman d'Alfarache, the 
most popular book of the kind, we believe, in 
Spain, and admired, we know, in this country 
by some excellent judges, we cannot with 
propriety speak, for we have only read a few 
pages at the beginning ; though we read those 
twice over, at two different times, and each 
time with the same intention of going on. In 
truth, as Guzman is called by way of emi- 
nence the Spanish Rogue, we must say for 
him, as far as our slight acquaintance war- 
rants it, that he is also " as tedious as a king." 
They say, however, he has excellent stuff in 
him. 

We can speak as little of Marcos de Obregon, 
of which a translation appeared a little while 
ago. We have read it, and, if we remember 
rightly, were pleased ; but want of memory 
on these occasions is not a good symptom. 
Quevedo, no ordinary person, is very amusing. 
His Visions of Hell, in particular, though of 
a very different kind from Dante's, are more 
edifying. But our business at present is with 
his " History of Paul the Spanish Sharper, the 
Pattern of Rogues and Mirror of Vagabonds" 
We do not know that he deserves these 
appellations so much as some others ; but 



33 



THE INDICATOR. 



they are to be looked upon as titular orna- 
ments, common to the Spanish IUeptocracy. 
He is extremely pleasant, especially in his 
younger days. His mother, who is no better 
than the progenitor of such a personage ought 
to be, happens to have the misfortune one day 
of being carted. Paul, who was then a school- 
boy, was elected king on some boyish holiday ; 
and riding out upon a half-starved horse, it 
picked up a small cabbage as they went 
through the market. The market - women 
began pelting the king with rotten oranges 
and turnip-tops ; upon which, having feathers 
in his cap, and getting a notion in his head 
that they mistook him for his mother, who, 
agreeably to a Spanish custom, was tricked 
out in the same manner when she was carted, 
he halloo' d out, " Good women, though I wear 
feathers in my cap, I am none of Alonza 
Saturuo de Rebillo. She is my mother." 

Paul used to be set upon unlucky tricks by 
the son of a man of rank, who preferred 
enjoying a joke to getting punished for it. 
Among others, one Christmas, a counsellor 
happening to go by of the name of Pontio de 
Auguirre, the little Don told his companion 
to call Pontius Pilate, and then to run away. 
He did so, and the angry counsellor followed 
after him with a knife in his hand, so that he 
was forced to take refuge in the house of the 
schoolmaster. The lawyer laid his indict- 
ment, and Paul got a hearty flogging, during 
which he was enjoined never to call Pontius 
Pilate again ; to which he heartily agreed. 
The consequence was, that next day, when 
the boys were at prayers, Paul, coming to 
the Belief, and thinking that he was never 
again to name Pontius Pilate, gravely said, 
" Suffered under Pontio de Auguirre ; " which 
evidence of his horror of the scourge so inte- 
rested the pedagogue, that, by a Catholic mode 
of dispensation, he absolved him from the next 
two whippings he should incur. 

But we forget that our little picaro was a 
thief. One specimen of his talents this way, 
and we have done with the Spaniards. He 
went with young Don Diego to the university ; 
and here getting applause for some tricks he 
played upon people, and dandling, as it were, 
his growing propensity to theft, he invited his 
companions one evening to see him steal a 
box of comfits from a confectioner's. He 
accordingly draws his rapier, which was stiff 
and well-pointed ; runs violently into the shop ; 
and exclaiming, " You 're a dead man ! " makes 
a fierce lunge at the confectioner between the 
body and arm. Down drops the man, half 
dead with fear ; the others rush out. But 
what of the box of comfits ? " Where are the 
box of comfits, Paul ?" said the rogues : " we 
do not see what you have done after all, except 
frighten the fellow." — " Look here, my boys," 
answered Paul. They looked, and at the end 
of his rapier beheld, with shouts of laughter, 



the vanquished box. He had marked it out 
on the shelf ; and under pretence of lunging 
at the confectioner, pinked it away like a 
muffin. 

Upon turning to Quevedo, we find that the 
story has grown a little upon our memory, as 
to detail; but this is the spirit of it. The 
prize here, it is to be observed, is something 
eatable ; and the same yearning is a predomi- 
nant property of Quevedo's sharpers, as well 
as the others. 

Adieu, ye pleasant rogues of Spain ! ye sur- 
mounters of bad government, hunger, and 
misery, by the mere force of a light climate 
and fingers ! The dinner calls ; — and to talk 
about you before it, is as good as taking a ride 
on horseback. 

We must return a moment to the Italian 
thieves, to relate a couple of stories related of 
Ariosto and Tasso. The former was for a 
short period governor of Grafagnana, a dis- 
turbed district in the Apennines, which his 
prudent and gentle policy brought back from 
its disaffection. Among its other troubles were 
numerous bands of robbers, two of the names 
of whose leaders, Domenico Maroco, and 
Filippo Pacchione, have come down to pos- 
terity. Ariosto, during the first days of his 
government, was riding out with a small 
retinue, when he had to pass through a numbei 
of suspicious-looking armed men. The two 
parties had scarcely cleared each other, when 
the chief of the strangers asked a servant, who 
happened to be at some distance behind the 
others, who that person was. " It is the captain 
of the citadel here," said the man, " Lodovico 
Ariosto." The stranger no sooner heard the 
name, than he went running back to overtake 
the governor, who, stopping his horse, waited 
with some anxiety for the event. " I beg youi 
pardon, Sir," said he, " but I was not aware 
that so great a person as the Signor Lodovico 
Ariosto was passing near me. My name is 
Filippo Pacchione ; and when I knew who it 
was, I could not go on without returning to 
pay the respect due to so illustrious a name." 

A doubt is thrown on this story, or rathei 
on the particular person who gave occasion to 
it, by the similarity of an adventure related of 
Tasso. Both of them however are very pro- 
bable, let the similarity be what it may ; for 
both the poets had occasion to go through 
disturbed districts ; robbers abounded in both 
their times ; and the leaders being most pro- 
bably men rather of desperate fortunes than 
want of knowledge, were likely enough to seize 
such opportunities of vindicating their better 
habits, and showing a romantic politeness. The 
enthusiasm too is quite in keeping with the 
national character ; and it is to be observed 
that the particulars of Tasso's adventure are 
different, though the spirit of it is the same. 
He was journeying, it is said, in company with 
others, for better security against the banditti 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



39 



who infested the borders of the papal territory, 
' when they were told that Sciarra, a famous 
! robber, was at hand in considerable force. 
| Tasso was for pushing on, and defending them- 
selves if attacked ; but his opinion was over- 
i ruled ; and the company threw themselves, for 
safety, into the city of Mola. Here Seiarra 
j kept them in a manner blocked up ; but hearing 
; that Tasso was among the travellers, he sent 
! him word that he should not only be allowed 
! to pass, but should have safe-conduct whither- 
i soever he pleased. The lofty poet, making it 
1 a matter of delicacy, perhaps, to waive an 
I advantage of which his company could not 
j partake, declined the offer ; upon which Sciarra 
' sent another message, saying, that upon the 
sole account of Tasso, the ways should be left 
open. And they were so. 

We can call to mind no particular German 
thieves, except those who figure in romances, 
and in the Robbers of Schiller. To say the 
truth, we are writing just now with but few 
, books to refer to ; and the better informed 
reader must pardon any deficiency he meets 
with in these egregious and furtive memo- 
randums. Of the Robbers of Schiller an extra- 
ordinary effect is related. It is said to have 
driven a number of wild-headed young Germans 
upon playing at banditti, not in the bounds of 
a school or university, but seriously in a forest. 
The matter-of-fact spirit in which a German 
sets about being enthusiastic, is a metaphysical 
curiosity which modern events render doubly 
interesting. It is extreme 1 y worthy of the 
attention of those rare personages, entitled 
reflecting politicians. But we must take care 
of that kind of digression. It is very inhuman 
of these politics, that the habit of attending to 
them, though with the greatest good-will and 
sincerity, will always be driving a man upon 
thinking how his fellow-creatures are going on. 
There is a pleasant, well-known story of a 
Prussian thief and Frederick the Second. 

We forget what was the precise valuable 
found upon the Prussian soldier, and missed 
from an image of the Virgin Mary; but we 
believe it was a ring. He was tried for sacri- 
lege, and the case seemed clear against him, 
when he puzzled his Catholic judges by in- 
forming them, that the fact was, the Virgin 
Mary had given him that ring. Here was a 
terrible dilemma. To dispute the possibility 
or even probability of a gift from the Virgin 
Mary, was to deny their religion : while, on 
j ihe other hand, to let the fellow escape on the 
pretence, was to canonize impudence itself. 
The worthy judges, in their perplexity, applied 
to the king, who, under the guise of behaving 
delicately to their faith, was not sorry to have 
1 such an opportunity of joking it. His majesty 
therefore pronounced, with becoming gravity, 
that the allegation of the soldier could not but 
have its due weight with all Catholic believers ; 
I but that in future, it was forbidden any Prus- 



sian subject, military or civil, to accept & present 
from the Virgin Mary. 

The district, formerly rendered famous by 
the exploits of Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, 
and since become infamous by the tyranny of 
Ali Bey, has been very fertile in robbers. And 
no wonder : for a semi-barbarous people so 
governed become thieves by necessity. The 
name indeed, as well as profession, is in such 
good receipt with an Albanian, that according 
to late travellers, it is a common thing for him 
to begin his history by saying, " When I was a 

robber " We remember reading of some 

Albanian or Sclavonian leader of banditti, who 
made his enemies suppose he had a numerous 
force with him, by distributing military caps 
upon the hedges. 

There are some other nations who are all 
thieves, more or less ; or comprise such 
numbers of them as very much militate against 
the national character. Such are the piratical 
Malays j the still more infamous Algerines ; 
and the mongrel tribes between Arabia and 
Abyssinia. As to the Arabs, they have a pre- 
scriptive right, from tradition as well as local 
circumstances, to plunder everybody. The 
sanguinary ruffians of Ashantee and other 
black empires on the coast of Guinea are more 
like a government of murderers and ogres, 
than thieves. They are the next ruffians 
perhaps in existence to slave-dealers. The 
gentlest nation of pilferers are the Otaheitans ; 
and something is to be said for their irresistible 
love of hatchets and old nails. Let the Euro 
pean trader, that is without sin, cast the firsf 
paragraph at them. Let him think what he 
should feel inclined to do, were a ship of some 
unknown nation to come upon his coast, with 
gold and jewels lying scattered about the deck 
For no less precious is iron to the South Sea 
Islander. A Paradisiacal state of existence 
would be, to him, not the Golden, but the IroD 
Age. An Otaheitan Jupiter would visit his 
Danae in a shower of tenpenny nails. 

We are now come to a very multitudinous 
set of candidates for the halter, the thieves of 
our own beloved country. For what we know 
of the French thieves is connected with them, 
excepting Cartouche ; and we remember no- 
thing of him, but that he was a great ruffian^ 
and died upon that worse ruffian, the rack. 

There is, to be sure, an eminent instance of 
a single theft in the Confessions of Rousseau : 
and it is the second greatest blot in his book ; 
for he suffered a girl to be charged with and 
punished for the theft, and maintained the lie 
to her face, though she was his friend, and ap- 
pealed to him with tears. But it may be said 
for him, at any rate, that the world would not 
have known the story but for himself : and if 
such a disclosure be regarded l>y some as an 
additional offence (which it may be thought to 
be by some very delicate as well as dishonest 
people), we must recollect, that it was the ob- 



40 



THE INDICATOR. 



ject of his book to give a plain unsophisticated 
account of a human being's experiences ; and 
that many persons of excellent repute would 
have been found to have committed actions as 
bad, had they given accounts of themselves as 
candid. Dr. Johnson was of opinion that all 
children were thieves and liars : and somebody, 
we believe a Scotchman, answered a fond 
speech about human nature, by exclaiming 
that " human nature was a rogue and a vaga- 
bond, or so many laws would not have been 
necessary to restrain it." We venture to differ, 
on this occasio. with both Englishman and 
Scotchman. Laws in particular, taking the 
bad with the good, are quite as likely to have 
made rogues, as restrained them. But Ave see, 
at any rate, what has been suspected of more 
orthodox persons than Rousseau ; to say no- 
thing of less charitable advantages which 
might be taken of such opinions. Rousseau 
committed a petty theft ; and miserably did 
his false shame, the parent of so many crimes, 
make him act. But he won back to their in- 
fants' lips the bosoms of thousands of mothers. 
He restored to their bereaved and helpless 
owners thousands of those fountains of health 
and joy : and before he is abused, even for 
worse tilings than the theft, let those whose 
virtue consists in custom, think of this. 

As we have mixed fictitious with real thieves 
in this article, in a manner, we fear, somewhat 
uncritical (and yet the fictions are most likely 
founded on fact ; and the life of a real thief is 
a kind of dream and romance), we will despatch 
our fictitious English thieves before we come 
to the others. And we must make shorter 
work of them than we intended, or we shall 
never come to our friend Du Vail. The length 
to which this article has stretched out, will be 
a warning to us how we render our paper 
liable to be run away with in future. 

There is a very fine story of Three Thieves 
in Chaucer, which we must tell at large an- 
other time. The most prominent of the fabu- 
lous thieves in England is that bellipotent and 
immeasurable wag, Falstaff. If for a momen- 
tary freak, he thought it villanous to steal, at 
the next moment he thought it villanous not 
to steal. 

" Hal, I pr'ythee, trouble me no more with 
vanity. I would to God thou and I knew where 
a commodity of good names were to be bought. 
An old lord of the council rated me the other 
day in the street, about you, Sir ; but I marked 
him not. And yet he talked very wisely ; but 
I regarded him not. And yet he talked wisely ; 
and in the streets, too. 

" P. Henry. Thou didst well ; for * Wisdom 
cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.' 

"Falstaff. O, thou hast damnable iteration ; 
and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint. Thou 
hast done much harm upon me, Hal ; God for- 
give thee for it ! Before I knew thee, Hal, 
1 knew nothing ; and now am I, if a man 



should speak truly, little better than one of 
the wicked. I must give over this life, and I 
will give it over : by the Lord, an I do not, I 
am a villain : I'll be damned for never a king's 
son in Christendom. 

"P. Henry. Where shall we take a purse 
to-morrow, Jack ? 

"Falstaff. Where thou wilt, lad ; I'll make 
one : an I do not, call me villain, and baffle 
me." 

We must take care how we speak of Mac- 
heath, or we shall be getting political again. 
Fielding's Jonathan Wild the G-reat is also, in 
this sense, " caviare to the multitude." But 
we would say more if we had room. Count 
Fathom, a deliberate scoundrel, compounded 
of the Jonathan Wilds and the more equivocal 
Cagliostros and other adventurers, is a thief 
not at all to our taste. We are continually 
obliged to call his mother to our recollection, 
in order to bear him. The only instance in 
which the character of an absolute profligate 
pickpocket was ever made comparatively wel- 
come to our graver feelings, is in the extraor- 
dinary story of " Manon VEscaut" by the Abbe 
Prevost. It is the story of a young man, so 
passionately in love with a profligate female, 
that he follows her through every species of 
vice and misery, even when she is sent as a 
convict to New Orleans. His love, indeed, is re- 
turned. He is obliged to subsist upon her vices, 
and, in return, is induced to help her with his 
own, becoming a cheat and a swindler to supply 
her outrageous extravagances. On board the 
convict-ship (if we recollect) he waits on her 
through every species of squalidness, the con- 
vict-dress and her shaved head only redoubling 
his love by the help of pity. This seems a 
shocking and very immoral book ; yet multi- 
tudes of very reputable people have found a 
charm in it. The fact is, not only that Manon 
is beautiful, sprightly, really fond of her lover, 
and after all, becomes reformed ; but that it is 
delightful, and ought to be so, to the human 
heart, to see a vein of sentiment and real good- 
ness looking out through all this callous sur- 
face of guilt. It is like meeting with a tree in 
a squalid hole of a city ; a flower or a frank 
face in a reprobate purlieu. The capabilities 
of human nature are not compromised. The 
virtue alone seems natural ; the guilt, as it so 
often is, seems artificial, and the result of 
some bad education or other circumstance. 
Nor is anybody injured. It is one of the 
shallowest of all shallow notions to talk of 
the harm of such works. Do we think no- 
body is to be harmed but the virtuous ; or 
that there are not privileged harms and vices 
to be got rid of, as well as unprivileged ? No 
good-hearted person will be injured by read- 
ing " Manon l'Escaut." There is the belief in 
goodness in it ; a faith, the want of which does 
so much harm, both to the vicious and the 
over-righteous. 



THIEVES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



41 



The prince of all robbers, English or foreign, 
is undoubtedly Robin Hood. There is a wor- 
thy Scottish namesake of his, Rob Roy, who 
has lately had justice done to all his injuries 
by a countryman ; and the author, it seems, 
has now come down from the borders to see 
the Rob of the elder times well treated. We 
were obliged to tear ourselves away from his 
first volume *, to go to this ill-repaying article. 
But Robin Hood will still remain the chief 
and "gentlest of thieves." He acted upon 
a larger scale, or in opposition to a larger 
injustice, to a whole political system. He 
" shook the superflux " to the poor, and 
" showed the heavens more just." However, 
what we have to say of him, we must keep 
till the trees are in leaf again, and the green- 
wood shade delightful. 

We dismiss, in one rabble-like heap, the 
real Jonathan Wilds, Avershaws, and other 
heroes of the Newgate Calendar, who have no 
redemption in their rascality ; and after them, 
for gentlemen- valets, may go the Barringtons, 
Major Semples, and other sneaking rogues, 
who held on a tremulous career of iniquity, 
betwixt pilfering and repenting. Yet Jack 
Sheppard must not be forgotten, with his 
ingenious and daring breaks-out of prison ; 
nor Turpin, who is said to have ridden his 
horse with such swiftness from York to 
London, that he was enabled to set up an 
alibi. We have omitted to notice the cele- 
brated Bucaniers of America ; but these are 
fellows, with regard to whom we are willing 
to take Dogberry's advice, and "steal out of 
their company." Their history disappoints us 
with its dryness. 

All hail ! thou most attractive of scape- 
graces ! thou most accomplished of gentlemen 
of the road ! thou, worthy to be called one of 
"the minions of the moon," Monsieur Claude 
Du Vail, whom we have come such a long and 
dangerous journey to see I 

Claude Du Vail, according to a pleasant 
account of him in the Harleian Miscellany, was 
born at Domfront, in Normandy, in the year 
1643, of Pierre Du Vail, miller, and Marguerite 
de la Roche, the fair daughter of a tailor. 
Being a sprightly boy, he did not remain in 
the country, but became servant to a person 
of quality at Paris, and with this gentleman 
he came over to England at the time of the 
Restoration. It is difficult to say, which came 
over to pick the most pockets and hearts, 
Charles the Second or Claude du Vail. Be 
this as it may, his " courses " of life (" for," 
says the contemporary historian, " I dare not 
call them vices,") soon reduced him to the 
necessity of going upon the road ; and here 
" he quickly became so famous, that in a 
proclamation for the taking several notorious 
highwaymen, he had the honour to be named 
first." " He took," says his biographer, " the 



* Of Ivanhoe. 



generous way of padding ; " that is to say, 
he behaved with exemplary politeness to all 
coaches, especially those in which there were 
ladies, making a point of frightening them 
as amiably as possible, and insisting upon 
returning any favourite trinkets or keepsakes, 
for which they chose to appeal to him with 
" their most sweet voices." 

It was in this character that he performed 
an exploit, which is the eternal feather in the 
cap of highway gentility. We will relate it in 
the words of our informer. Riding out with 
some of his confederates, " he overtakes a 
coach, which they had set over night, having 
intelligence of a booty of four hundred pounds 
in it. In the coach was a knight, his lady, 
and only one serving-maid, who, perceiving 
five horsemen making up to them, presently 
imagined that they were beset ; and they were 
confirmed in this apprehension by seeing them 
whisper to one another and ride backwards 
and forwards. The lady, to show she was 
not afraid, takes a flageolet out of her pocket, 
and plays ; Du Vail takes the hint, plays also, 
and excellently well, upon a flageolet of his 
own, and in this posture he rides up to the 
coach side. ' Sir,' says he to the person in 
the coach, 'your lady plays excellently, and 
I doubt not but that she dances as well ; 
will you please to walk out of the coach, 
and let me have the honour to dance one 
coranto with her upon the heath ? ' ' Sir,' 
said the person in the coach, ' I dare not 
deny anything to one of your quality and 
good mind ; you seem a gentleman, and your 
request is very reasonable:' which said, the 
lacquey opens the boot, out comes the knight, 
Du Vail leaps lightly off his horse, and hands 
the lady out of the coach. They danced, and 
here it was that Du Vail performed marvels ; 
the best master in London, except those that 
are French, not being able to show such foot- 
ing as he did in his great riding French boots. 
The dancing being over, he waits on the lady 
to her coach. As the knight was going in, 
says Du Vail to him, ' Sir, you have forgot 
to pay the music.' ' No, I have not,' replies 
the knight, and putting his hand under the 
seat of the coach, pulls out a hundred pounds 
in a bag, and delivers it to him, which Du 
Vail took with a very good grace, and courte- 
ously answered, ' Sir, you are liberal, and shall 
have no cause to repent your being so ; this 
liberality of yours shall excuse you the other 
three hundred pounds : ' and giving him the 
word, that if he met with any more of the 
crew he might pass undisturbed, he civilly 
takes his leave of him. 

" This story, I confess, justifies the great 
kindness the ladies had for Du Vail ; for in 
this, as in an epitome, are contained all things 
that set a man off advantageously, and make 
him appear, as the phrase is, much a gentleman 
First, here was valour, that he and but fou> 



42 



THE INDICATOR. 



more durst assault a knight, a lady, a waiting- 
gentlewoman, a lacquey, a groom that rid by 
to open the gates, and the coachman, they 
being six to five, odds at football ; and 
besides, Du Vail had much the worst cause, 
and reason to believe, that whoever should 
arrive, would range themselves on the enemy's 
party. Then he showed his invention and 
sagacity, that he could, sur le champ, and, with- 
out studying, make that advantage on the 
lady's playing on the flageolet. He evinced 
his skill in instrumental music, by playing on 
his flageolet ; in vocal, by his singing ; for (as 
I should have told you before) there being no 
violins, Du Vail sung the coranto himself. 
He manifested his agility of body, by lightly 
dismounting off his horse, and with ease 
and freedom getting up again, when he took 
his leave ; his excellent deportment, by his 
incomparable dancing, and his graceful man- 
ner of taking the hundred pounds ; his gene- 
rosity, in taking no more ; his wit and elo- 
quence, and readiness at repartees, in the 
whole discourse with the knight and lady, 
the greatest part of which I have been forced 
to omit." 

The noise of the proclamation made Du Vail 
return to Paris ; but he came back in a short 
time for want of money. His reign however 
did not last long after his restoration. He 
made an unlucky attack, not upon some ill- 
bred passengers, but upon several bottles of 
wine, and was taken in consequence at the 
Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos-street. His life 
was interceded for in vain : he was arraigned 
and committed to Newgate ; and executed at 
Tyburn in the 27th year of his age ; showers 
of tears from fair eyes bedewing his fate, both 
while alive in prison, and when dead at the 
fatal tree. 

Du ValPs success with the ladies of those 
days, whose amatory taste was of a turn more 
extensive than delicate, seems to have made 
some well-dressed English gentlemen jealous. 
The writer of Du Vall's life, who is a man of 
wit, evidently has something of bitterness in 
his railleries upon this point ; but he manages 
them very pleasantly. He pretends that he is 
an old bachelor, and has never been able to 
make his way with his fair countrywomen, on 
account of the French valets that have stood 
in his way. He says he had two objects in 
writing the book. " One is, that the next 
Frenchman that is hanged may not cause an 
uproar in this imperial city ; which I doubt 
not but I have effected. The other is a much 
harder task : to set my countrymen on even 
terms with the French, as to the English 
ladies' affections. If I should bring this about, 
I should esteem myself to have contributed 
much to the good of this kingdom. 

" One remedy there is, which, possibly, may 
conduce something towards it. 

* I have heard, that there is a new invention 



of transfusing the blood of one animal into 
another, and that it has been experimented by 
putting the blood of a sheep into an English- 
man. I am against that way of experiments ; 
for, should we make all Englishmen sheep, we 
should soon be a prey to the louve. 

"I think I can propose the making that 
experiment a more advantageous way. I 
would have all gentlemen, who have been a 
full year or more out of France, be let blood 
weekly, or oftener, if they can bear it. Mark 
how much they bleed ; transfuse so much 
French lacquey's blood into them ; replenish 
these last out of the English footmen, for it is 
no matter what becomes of them. Repeat this 
operation toties quotics, and in process of time 
you will find this event : either the English 
gentlemen will be as much beloved as the 
French lacqueys, or the French lacqueys as 
little esteemed as the English gentlemen." 

Butler has left an Ode, sprinkled with his 
usual wit, " To the happy Memory of the Most 
Renowned Du Vail" who 

—Like a pious man, some years beforo 
Th' arrival of his fatal hour, 
Made every day he had to live 
To his last minute a preparative ; 
Taught the wild Arabs on the road 
To act in a more gentle mode ; 
Take prizes more obligingly from those, 
Who never had been bredjilous ; 
And how to hang in a more graceful fashion 
Than e'er was known before to the dull English nation. 

As it may be thought proper that we should 
end this lawless article with a good moral, we 
will give it two or three sentences from Shak- 
speare worth a whole volume of sermons 
against thieving. The boy who belongs to 
FalstafPs companions, and who begins to see 
through the shallowness of their cunning and 
way of life, says that Bardolph stole a lute- 
case, carried it twelve miles, and sold it for 
three halfpence. 



XXI.— A FEW THOUGHTS ON SLEEP. 

This is an article for the reader to think of, 
when he or she is warm in bed, a little before 
he goes to sleep, the clothes at his ear, and the 
wind moaning in some distant crevice. 

" Blessings," exclaimed Sancho, a on him 
that first invented sleep ! It wraps a man all 
round like a cloak." It is a delicious moment 
certainly, — that of being well nestled in bed, 
and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. 
The good is to come, not past : the limbs have 
been just tired enough to render the remain- 
ing in one posture delightful : the labour of 
the day is done. A gentle failure of the per- 
ceptions comes creeping over one : — the spirit 
of consciousness disengages itself more and 
more, with slow and hushing degrees, like a 
mother detaching her hand from that of her 



A FEW THOUGHTS ON SLEEP. 



43 



sleeping child ; — the mind seems to have a balmy 
lid closing over it, like the eye ; — 'tis closing ; — 
'tis more closing ; — 'tis closed. The mysterious 
spirit has gone to take its airy rounds. 

It is said that sleep is best before midnight : 
and Nature herself, with her darkness and 
chilling dews, informs us so. There is another 
reason for going to bed betimes : for it is uni- 
versally acknowledged that lying late in the 
morning is a great shortener of life. At least, 
it is never found in company with longevity. 
It also tends to make people corpulent. But 
these matters belong rather to the subject of 
early rising, than of sleep. 

Sleep at a late hour in the morning is not 
half so pleasant as the more timely one. It is 
sometimes however excusable, especially to a 
watchful or overworked head ; neither can we 
deny the seducing merits of " t' other doze," — 
the pleasing wilfulness of nestling in a new 
posture, when you know you ought to be up, 
like the rest of the house. But then you cut 
up the day, and your sleep the next night. 

In the course of the day, few people think 
of sleeping, except after dinner ; and then it 
is often rather a hovering and nodding on the 
borders of sleep, than sleep itself. This is a 
privilege allowable, we think, to none but the 
old, or the sickly, or the very tired and care- 
worn ; and it should be well understood, before 
it is exercised in company. To escape into 
slumber from an argument ; or to take it as 
an affair of course, only between you and your 
biliary duct ; or to assent with involuntary 
nods to all that you have just been disputing, 
is not so well : much less, to sit nodding and 
tottering beside a lady ; or to be in danger of 
dropping your head into the fruit-plate or your 
host's face ; or of waking up, and saying, 
" Just so," to the bark of a dog ; or " Yes, 
Madam," to the black at your elbow. 

Care-worn people, however, might refresh 
themselves oftener with day-sleep than they 
do ; if their bodily state is such as to dispose 
them to it. It is a mistake to suppose that all 
care is wakeful. People sometimes sleep, as 
well as wake, by reason of their sorrow. The 
difference seems to depend upon the nature of 
their temperament ; though in the most exces- 
sive cases, sleep is perhaps Nature's never- 
failing relief, as swooning is upon the rack. 
! A person with jaundice in his blood shall lie 
J down and go to sleep at noon-day, when 
< another of a different complexion shall find 
: his eyes as uncloseable as a statue's, though he 
| has had no sleep for nights together. With- 
j out meaning to lessen the dignity of suffering, 
j which has quite enough to do with its waking 
hours, it is this that may often account for the 
profound sleeps enjoyed the night before 
hazardous battles, executions, and other 
demands upon an over-excited spirit. 

The most complete and healthy sleep that 
can be taken in the day, is in summer-time, 



out in a field. There is perhaps no solitary 
sensation so exquisite as that of slumbering 
on the grass or hay, shaded from the hot sun 
by a tree, with the consciousness of a fresh 
but light air running through the wide atmo- 
sphere, and the sky stretching far overhead 
upon all sides. Earth, and heaven, and a 
placid humanity, seem to have the creation to 
themselves. There is nothing between the 
slumberer and the naked and glad innocence 
of nature. 

Next to this, but at a long interval, the 
most relishing snatch of slumber out of bed, is 
the one which a tired person takes, before he 
retires for the night, while lingering in his 
sitting-room. The consciousness of being very 
sleepy and of having the power to go to bed 
immediately, gives great zest to the unwilling- 
ness to move. Sometimes he sits nodding in 
his chair ; but the sudden and leaden jerks of 
the head to which a state of great sleepiness 
renders him liable, are generally too painful 
for so luxurious a moment ; and he gets into a 
more legitimate posture, sitting sideways with 
his head on the chair-back, or throwing his 
legs up at once on another chair, and half 
reclining. It is curious, however, to find how 
long an inconvenient posture will be borne for 
the sake of this foretaste of repose. The worst 
of it is, that on going to bed, the charm some- 
times vanishes ; perhaps from the colder 
temperature of the chamber ; for a fireside is 
a great opiate. 

Speaking of the painful positions into which 
a sleepy lounger will get himself, it is amusing 
to think of the more fantastic attitudes that so 
often take place in bed. If we could add any- 
thing to the numberless things that have been 
said about sleep by the poets, it would be upon 
this point. Sleep never shows himself a 
greater leveller. A man in his waking mo- 
ments may look as proud and self-possessed as 
he pleases. He may walk proudly, he may sit 
proudly, he may eat his dinner proudly ; he 
may shave himself with an air of infinite 
superiority ; in a word, he may show himself 
grand and absurd upon the most trifling occa- 
sions. But Sleep plays the petrifying magician. 
He arrests the proudest lord as well as the 
humblest clown in the most ridiculous pos- 
tures : so that if you could draw a grandee 
from his bed without waking him, no limb- 
twisting fool in a pantomime should create 
wilder laughter. The toy with the string 
between its legs, is hardly a posture-master 
more extravagant. Imagine a despot lifted 
up to the gaze of his valets, with his eyes shut, 
his mouth open, his left hand under his right 
ear, his other twisted and hanging helplessly 
before him like an idiot's, one knee lifted up, 
and the other leg stretched out, or both knees 
huddled up together ; — what a scarecrow to 
lodge majestic power in ! 

But Sleep is kindly, even in his tricks ; and 



44 



THE INDICATOR. 



the poets have treated him with proper rever- 
ence. According to the ancient mythologists, 
he had even one of the Graces to wife. He 
had a thousand sons, of whom the chief were 
Morpheus, or the Shaper ; Icelos, or the 
Likely ; Phantasus, the Fancy ; and Phobetor, 
the Terror. His dwelling some writers place 
in a dull and darkling part of the earth ; others, 
withgreater compliment, in heaven ; and others, 
with another kind of propriety, by the sea- 
shore. There is a good description of it in 
Ovid ; but in these abstracted tasks of poetry, 
the moderns outvie the ancients ; and there is 
nobody who has built his bower for him so 
finely as Spenser. Archimago in the first 
book of the Faerie Queene (Canto I. st. 39), 
sends a little spirit down to Morpheus to fetch 
him a Dream : 

He, making speedy way through spersed ayre, 
And through the world of waters, wide and deepe, 
To Morpheus' house doth hastily repaire. 
Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe 
And low, where dawning day doth never peepe, 
His dwelling is. There, Tethys his wet bed 
Doth ever wash ; and Cynthia still doth steepe 
In silver dew his ever-drouping head, 
Whiles 6ad Night over him her mantle black doth spred. 

And more to lull him in his slumber soft 
A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe, 
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, 
Mixed with a murmuring winde, much like the soune 
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoune. 
No other noise, nor people's troublous cryes, 
As still are wont to annoy the walled towne, 
Might there be heard ; but carelesse Quiet lyes, 
Wrapt in eternall silence, far from enimyes. 

Chaucer has drawn the cave of the same 
god with greater simplicity ; but nothing can 
have a more deep and sullen effect than his 
cliffs and cold running waters. It seems as 
real as an actual solitude, or some quaint old 
picture in a book of travels in Tartary. He is 
telling the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in the 
poem called his Dream. Juno tells a messen- 
ger to go to Morpheus and "bid him creep 
into the body" of the drowned king, to let 
his wife know the fatal event by his appa- 
rition. 

This messenger tooke leave, and went 

Upon his way ; and never he stent 

Till he came to the dark valley, 

That stant betweene rockes twey. 

There never yet grew corne, ne gras, 

Ne tree, ne nought that aught was, 

Beast, ne man, ne naught else ; 

Save that there were a few wells 

Came running fro the cliffs adowne, 

That made a deadly sleeping soune, 

And runnen downe right by a cave, 

That was under a rocky grave, 

Amid the valley, wonder-deepe. 

There these goddis lay asleepe, 

Morpheus and Eclympasteire, 

That was the god of Sleepis heire, 

That slept and did none other worke. 

Where the credentials of this new son and 
heir Eclympasteire, are to be found, we know 
not ,• but he acts very much, it must be allowed, 



like an heir presumptive, in sleeping, and doing 
"none other work." 

We dare not trust ourselves with many quo- 
tations upon sleep from the poets ; they are so 
numerous as well as beautiful. We must content 
ourselves with mentioning that our two most 
favourite passages are one in the Philoctetes 
of Sophocles, admirable for its contrast to a 
scene of terrible agony, which it closes ; and 
the other the following address in Beaumont 
and Fletcher's tragedy of Valentinian, the hero 
of which is also a sufferer under bodily tor- 
ment. He is in a chair, slumbering ; and 
these most exquisite lines are gently sung 
with music. 

Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes, 
Brother to Death, sweetly thyself dispose 
On this afflicted prince. Fall like a cloud 
In gentle showers : give nothing that is loud 
Or painful to his slumbers : easy, sweet, 
And as a purling stream, thou son of Night, 
Pass by his troubled senses ; sing his pain. 
Like hollow murmuring wind, or silver rain : 
Into this prince, gently, oh gently slide, 
And kiss him into slumbers, like a bride. 

How earnest and prayer-like are these pauses! 
How lightly sprinkled, and yet how deeply 
settling, like rain, the fancy ! How quiet, 
affectionate, and perfect the conclusion ! 

Sleep is most graceful in an infant ; soundest, 
in one who has been tired in the open air ; 
completest, to the seaman after a hard voyage ; 
most welcome, to the mind haunted with one 
idea ; most touching to look at, in the parent 
that has wept ; lightest, in the playful child ; 
proudest, in the bride adored. 



XXII.— THE FAIR REVENGE. 

The elements of this story are to be found 
in the old poem called Albion's England, to 
which we referred in the article on Charles 
Brandon and Mary Queen of France. 

Aganippus, king of Argos, dying without 
heirs male, bequeathed his throne to his only 
daughter, the beautiful and beloved Daphles. 
This female succession was displeasing to a 
nobleman who held large possessions on the 
frontiers ; and he came for the first time to- 
wards the court, not to pay his respects to the 
new queen, but to give her battle. Doracles 
(for that was his name) was not, much known 
by the people. He had distinguished himself 
for as jealous an independence as a subject 
could well assume ; and though he had been 
of use in repelling invasion during the latter 
years of the king, he had never made his 
appearance to receive his master's thanks 
personally. A correspondence, however, was 
understood to have gone on between him and 
several noblemen about the court ; and there 
were those who, in spite of his inattention to 
popularity, suspected that it would go hard 



THE FAIR REVENGE. 



45 



with the young queen, when the two armies 
came face to face. 

But neither these subtle statesmen, nor the 
ambitious young soldier Doracles, were aware 
of the effects to be produced by a strong per- 
sonal attachment. The young queen, amiable 
as she was beautiful, had involuntarily baffled 
his expectations from her courtiers, by excit- 
ing in the minds of some a real disinterested 
regard, while others nourished a hope of 
sharing her throne instead. At least they 
speculated upon becoming each the favourite 
minister, and held it a better thing to reign 
under that title and a charming mistress, than 
be the servants of a master, wilful and domi- 
neering. By the people she was adored ; and 
when she came riding out of her palace on 
the morning of the fight, with an unaccustomed 
spear standing up in its rest by her side, her 
diademed hair flowing a little off into the 
wind, her face paler than usual, but still tinted 
withits roses, and alookin which confidence in 
the love of her subjects, and tenderness for 
the wounds they were going to encounter, 
seemed to contend for the expression, the 
shout which they sent up would have told 
a stouter heart than a traitor's, that the 
royal- charmer was secure. 

The queen, during the conflict, remained 
in a tent upon an eminence, to which the 
younger leaders vied who should best spur up 
their smoking horses, to bring her good news 
from time to time. The battle was short and 
bloody. Doracles soon found that he had 
miscalculated his point ; and all skill and 
resolution could not set the error to rights. 
It was allowed, that if either courage or 
military talent could entitle him to the throne, 
he would have a right to it ; but the popu- 
larity of Daphles supplied her cause with all 
the ardour which a lax state of subjection on 
the part of the more powerful nobles might 
have denied it. When her troops charged, or 
made any other voluntary movement, they put 
all their hearts into their blows ; and when 
they were compelled to await the enemy, they 
stood as inflexible as walls of iron. It was 
like hammering upon metal statuary ; or stak- 
ing the fated horses upon spears riveted in 
stone. Doracles was taken prisoner. The 
queen, re-issuing from her tent, crowned with 
laurel, came riding down the eminence, and 
remained at the foot with her generals, while 
the prisoners were taken by. Her pale face 
kept as royal a countenance of composed pity 
as she could manage, while the commoner 
rebels passed along, aching with their wounded 
arms fastened behind, and shaking back their 
bloody and blinding locks for want of a hand 
to part them. But the blood mounted to her 
cheeks, when the proud and handsome Dora- 
cles, whom she now saw for the first time, 
blushed deeply as he cast a glance at his 
female conqueror, and then stepped haughtily 



along, handling his gilded chains as if they 
were an indifferent ornament. " I have con- 
quered him," thought she ; " it is a heavy 
blow to so proud a head ; and as he looks not 
unamiable, it might be politic, as well as 
courteous and kind in me, to turn his sub- 
mission into a more willing one." Alas ! pity 
was helping admiration to a kinder set of 
offices than the generous-hearted queen sus- 
pected. The captive went to his prison a con- 
queror after all, for Daphles loved him. 

The second night, after having exhibited in 
her manners a strange mixture of joy and 
seriousness, and signified to her counsellors 
her intention of setting the prisoner free, she 
released him with her own hands. Many a 
step did she hesitate as she went down the 
stairs ; and when she came to the door, she 
shed a full, but soft, and, as it seemed to her, 
a wilful and refreshing flood of tears, humbling 
herself for her approaching task. When she 
had entered, she blushed deeply, and then 
txirning as pale, stood for a minute silent and 
without motion. She then said, " Thy queen, 
Doracles, has come to show thee how kindly 
she can treat a great and gallant subject, who 
did not know her ;" and with these words, and 
almost before she was aware, the prisoner was 
released, and preparing to go. He appeared 
surprised, but not off his guard, nor in any 
temper to be over grateful. " Name," said he, 
a O queen, the conditions on which I depart, 
and they will be faithfully kept." Daphles 
moved her lips, but they spoke not. She waved 
her head and hand with a deadly smile, as if 
freeing him from all conditions, and he was 
turning to go, when she fell senseless on the 
floor. The haughty warrior raised her with 
more impatience than good-will. He could 
guess at love in a woman ; but he had but a 
mean opinion both of it and her sex ; and the 
deadly struggle in the heart of Daphles did 
not help him to distinguish the romantic passion 
which had induced her to put all her past and 
virgin notions of love into his person, from the 
commonest liking that might flatter his soldierly 
vanity. 

The queen, on awaking from her swoon, 
found herself compelled, in very justice to the 
intensity of a true passion, to explain how 
pity had brought it upon her. " I might ask 
it," said she, " Doracles, in return," and here 
she resumed something of her queen-like dig- 
nity ; " but I feel that my modesty will be 
sufficiently saved by the name of your wife ; 
and a substantial throne, with a return that 
shall nothing perplex or interfere with thee, I 
do now accordingly offer thee, not as the con- 
dition of thy freedom, but as a diversion of 
men's eyes and thoughts from what they will 
think ill in me, if they find me rejected." And 
in getting out that hard word, her voice faltered 
a little, and her eyes filled with tears. 

Doracles, with the best grace his lately 



4fi 



THE INDICATOR. 



defeated spirit could assume, spoke in willing 
terms of accepting her offer. They left the 
prison, and his full pardon having been pro- 
claimed, the courtiers, with feasts and enter- 
tainments, vied who should seem best to approve 
their mistress's choice, for so they were quick 
to understand it. The late captive, who was 
really as graceful and accomplished as a proud 
spirit would let him be, received and returned 
all their attention in princely sort, and Daphles 
was beginning to hope that he might turn a 
glad eye upon her some day, when news was 
brought her that he had gone from court, 
nobody knew whither. The next intelligence 
was too certain. He had passed the frontiers, 
and was leaguing with her enemies for another 
struggle. 

From that day gladness, though not kindness, 
went out of the face of Daphles. She wrote 
him a letter, without a word of reproach in it, 
enough to bring back the remotest heart that 
had the least spark of sympathy ; but he only 
answered it in a spirit which showed that he 
regarded the deepest love but as a wanton 
trifle. That letter touched her kind wits. She 
had had a paper drawn up, leaving him her 
throne in case she should die ; but some of her 
ministers, availing themselves of her enfeebled 
spirit, had summoned a meeting of the nobles, 
at which she was to preside in the dress she 
wore on the day of victory, the sight of which, 
it was thought, with the arguments which 
they meant to use, would prevail upon the 
assembly to urge her to a revocation of the 
bequest. Her women dressed her whilst she 
was almost unconscious of what they were 
doing, for she had now begun to fade quickly, 
body as well as mind. They put on her the 
white garments edged with silver waves, in 
remembrance of the stream of Inachus, the 
founder of the Argive monarchy; the spear 
was brought out, to be stuck by the side of the 
throne, instead of the sceptre ; and their hands 
prepared to put the same laurel on her head 
which bound its healthy white temples when 
she sat on horseback and saw the prisoner go 
by. But at sight of its twisted and withered 
green, she took it in her hand, and looking 
about her in her chair with an air of momen- 
tary recollection, began picking it, and letting 
the leaves fall upon the floor. She went on 
thus, leaf after leaf, looking vacantly down- 
wards, and when she had stripped the circle 
half round, she leaned her cheek against the 
side of her sick chair, and shutting her eyes 
quietly, so died. 

The envoys from Argos went to the court of 
Calydon, where Doraclesthen was, and bringing 
him the diadem upon a black cushion, informed 
him at once of the death of the queen, and her 
nomination of him to the throne. He showed 
little more than a ceremonious gravity at the 
former ne^vs; but could ill contain his joy at 
the latter, and set off instantly to take pos- 



session. Among the other nobles who feasted 
him, was one who, having been the companion 
of the late king, had become like a second 
father to his unhappy daughter. The new 
prince observing the melancholy which he 
scarcely affected to repress, and seeing him 
look up occasionally at a picture which had a 
veil over it, asked him what the picture was 
that seemed to disturb him so, and why it was 
veiled. " If it be the portrait of the late king," 
said Doracles, " pray think me worthy of doing 
honour to it, for he was a noble prince. Unveil 
it, pray. I insist upon it. What ! am I not 
worthy to look upon my predecessors, Phorbas?" 
And at these words he frowned impatiently. 
Phorbas, with a trembling hand, but not for 
want of courage, withdrew the black covering ; 
and the portrait of Daphles, in all her youth 
and beauty, flashed upon the eyes of Doracles. 
It was not a melancholy face. It was drawn 
before misfortune had touched it, and sparkled 
with a blooming beauty, in which animal spirits 
and good-nature contended for predominance. 
Doracles paused and seemed struck. " The 
possessor of that face," said he, inquiringly, 
" could never have been so sorrowful as I have 
heard ? " " Pardon me, Sir," answered Phorbas, 
" I was as another father to her, and knew all." 
" It cannot be," returned the prince. The old 
man begged his other guests to withdraw a 
while, and then told Doracles how many fond 
and despairing things the queen had said of 
him, both before her wits began to fail and 
after. "Her wits to fail!" murmured the 
king ; " I have known what it is to feel almost 
a mad impatience of the will; but I knew not 
that these gentle creatures, women, could so 
feel for such a trifle." Phorbas brought out 
the laurel-crown, and told him how the half of 
it became bare. The impatient blood of Dora- 
cles mounted, but not in anger, to his face ; 
and, breaking up the party, he requested that 
the picture might be removed to his own 
chamber, promising to return it. 

A whole year, however, did he keep it ; and 
as he had no foreign enemies to occupy his 
time, nor was disposed to enter into the 
common sports of peace, it was understood 
that he spent the greatest part of his time, 
when he was not in council, in the room where 
the picture hung. In truth, the image of the 
once smiling Daphles haunted him wherever 
he went ; and to ease himself of the yearning | 
of wishing her alive again and seeing her face, 
he was in the habit of being with it as much 
as possible. His self-will turned upon him, 
even in that gentle shape. Millions of times 
did he wish back the loving author of his for- 
tunes, whom he had treated with so clownish j 
an ingratitude ; and millions of times did the J 
sense of the impotence of his wish run up in | 
red hurry to his cheeks, and help to pull them j 
into a gaunt melancholy. But this is not a j 
repaying sorrow to dwell upon. He was one | 



SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY. 



47 



day, after being in vain expected at council, 
found lying madly on the floor of the room, 
dead. He had torn the portrait from the wall. 
His dagger was in his heart, and his cheek 
lay upon that blooming and smiling face, which 
had it been living, would never have looked 
so at being revenged. 



XXIII.- 



-SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT 
MYTHOLOGY. 



From having a different creed of our own, 
and always encountering the heathen mythology 
in a poetical and fabulous shape, we are apt 
to have a false idea of the religious feeling of 
the ancients. We are in the habit of supposing, 
whatever we allow when we come to reason 
upon the point, that they regarded their fables 
in the same poetical light as ourselves ; that 
they could not possibly put faith in Jupiter, 
Neptune, and Pluto ; in the sacrifice of in- 
nocent turtle-doves, the libation of wine, and 
the notions about Tartarus and Ixion. 

Undoubtedly there were multitudes of free- 
thinkers in the ancient world. Most of the 
Greek poets and philosophers appear to have 
differed with the literal notions of the many*. 
A system of refined theism is understood to 
have been taught to the initiated in the cele- 
brated Mysteries. The doctrines of Epicurus 
were so prevalent in the most intellectual age 
of Rome, that Lucretius wrote a poem upon 
them, in which he treats their founder as a 
divinity ; and Virgil, in a well-known passage 
of the Georgics : " Felix qui potuit," &c, 
exalts either Epicurus or Lucretius as a blessed 
being, who put hell and terror under his feet. 
A sickly temperament appears to have made 
him wish, rather than be able, to carry his own 
scepticism so far ; yet he insinuates his dis- 
belief in Tartarus, in the sixth book of his epic 
poem, where iEneas and the Sibyl, after the 
description of the lower world, go out through 
the ivory gate, which was the passage of false 
visions +. Caesar, according to a speech of his 
in Sallust, derided the same notions in open 
senate ; and Cicero, in other parts of his 
writings, as well as in a public pleading, speaks 
of them as fables and impertinence, — " ineptiis 
ac fabulis." 

But however this plain-dealing may look on 
the part of the men of letters, there is reason 

* It is remarkable that JEschylus and Euripides, the 
two dramatists whose faith in the national religion was 
most doubted, are said to have met with strange and 
violent deaths. The latter was torn to pieces by dogs, 
and the former killed by a tortoise which an eagle let fall 
upon his bald head, in mistake for a stone. These exits 
from the scene look very like the retributive death-beds 
which the bigots of all religions are so fond of ascribing to 
one another. 

t Did Dante forget this, when he took Virgil for his 
guide through the Inferno ? 



to believe, that even in those times, the people, 
in general, were strong upon points of faith. 
The extension of the Greek philosophy may 
have insensibly rendered them familiar with 
latitudes of interpretation on the part of others. 
They would not think it impious in Cicero and 
Cato to have notions of the Supreme Being 
more consistent with the elevation of their 
minds. But for themselves, they adhered, 
from habit, to the literal creed of their an- 
cestors, as the Greek populace had done before 
them. The jealous enemies of Socrates con- 
trived to have him put to death on a charge of 
irreverence for the gods. A frolic of the 
libertine Alcibiades, which, to say the least of 
it, was in bad taste — the defacing the statues 
of Mercury — was followed with important con- 
sequences. The history of Socrates had the 
effect, in after times, at least in the ancient 
world, of saving philosophical speculators from 
the vindictive egotism of opinion. But even 
in the days of Augustus, Ovid wrote a popular 
work full of mythological fables ; and Virgil 
himself, whose creed perhaps only rejected 
what was unkindly, gave the hero of his in- 
tended popular epic the particular appellation 
of pious. That Augustus should pique himself 
on the same attribute proves little ; for he 
was a cold-blooded man of the world, and 
could play the hypocrite for the worst and 
most despotic purposes. Did he now and then 
lecture his poetical friends upon this point, 
respecting their own appearances with the 
world? There is a curious ode of Horace 
(Book I. Ode xxxiv.), in which he says, that he 
finds himself compelled to give up his sceptical 
notions, and to attend more to public worship, 
because it had thundered one day when the 
sky was cloudless. The critics are divided in 
their opinion of his object in this ode. Some 
think him in earnest, others in jest. It is the 
only thing of the sort in his works, and is, at 
all events, of an equivocal character, that would 
serve his purpose on either side of the question. 
The opinions of the ancients upon religion 
may be divided into three general classes. 
The great multitude believed anything ; the 
very few disbelieved everything ; the philo- 
sophers and poets entertained a refined natural 
religion, which, while it pronounced upon 
nothing, rejected what was evidently unworthy 
of the spirit of the creation, and regarded the 
popular deities as personifications of its various 
workings. All these classes had their extra- 
vagances, in proportion to their ignorance, or 
viciousness, or metaphysical perplexity. The 
multitude, whose notions were founded on 
ignorance, habit, and fear, admitted many 
absurd, and some cruel imaginations. The 
mere man of the world measured everything 
by his own vain and petty standard, and thought 
the whole goods of the universe a scramble 
for the cunning and hypocritical. The over 
refining, followers of Plato, endeavouring to 



48 



THE INDICATOR. 



pierce into the nature of things by the mere 
effort of the will, arrived at conclusions visible 
to none but their own yearning and impatient 
eyes, and lost themselves in the ethereal dog- 
matisms of Plotinus and Porphyry. 

The greatest pleasure arising to a modern 
imagination from the ancient mythology, is in 
a mingled sense of the old popular belief and 
of the philosophical refinements upon it. We 
take Apollo, and Mercury, and Venus, as 
shapes that existed in popular credulity, as 
the greater fairies of the ancient world : and 
we regard them, at the same time, as personi- 
fications of all that is beautiful and genial in 
the forms and tendencies of creation. But 
the result, coming as it does, too, through 
avenues of beautiful poetry, both ancient and 
modern, is so entirely cheerful, that we are apt 
to think it must have wanted gravity to more 
believing eyes. "We fancy that the old world 
saw nothing in religion but lively and graceful 
shapes, as remote from the more obscure and 
awful hintings of the world unknown, as 
physics appear to be from the metaphysical ; as 
the eye of a beautiful woman is from the inward 
speculations of a Brahmin ; or a lily at noon- 
day from the wide obscurity of night-time. 

This supposition appears to be carried a 
great deal too far. We will not inquire, in this 
place, how far the mass of mankind, when these 
shapes were done away, did or did not escape 
from a despotic anthropomorphitism ; nor how 
far they were driven by the vaguer fears, and 
the opening of a more visible eternity, into 
avoiding the whole subject, rather than court- 
ing it; nor how it is, that the nobler practical re- 
ligion which was afforded them, has been unable 
to bring back their frightened theology from 
the angry and avaricious pursuits into which 
they fled for refuge. But, setting aside the 
portion of terror, of which heathenism partook 
in common with all faiths originating in uncul- 
tivated times, the ordinary run of pagans were 
perhaps more impressed with a sense of the 
invisible world, in consequence of the very 
visions presented to their imagination, than 
the same description of men under a more 
shadowy system. There is the same difference 
between the two things, as between a populace 
believing in fairies, and a populace not believ- 
ing. The latter is in the high road to some- 
thing better, if not drawn aside into new terrors 
on the one hand or mere worldliness on the 
other. But the former is led to look out of 
the mere worldly common-places about it, 
twenty times to the other's once. It has a 
sense of a supernatural state of things, how- 
ever gross. It has a link with another world, 
from which something like gravity is sure to 
strike into the most cheerful heart. Every 
forest, to the mind's eye of a Greek, was 
haunted with superior intelligences. Every 
stream had its presiding nymph, who was 
thanked for the draught of water. Every 



house had itsprotecting gods, whichhad blessed 
the inmate's ancestors, and which would bless 
him also, if he cultivated the social affections : 
for the same word which expressed piety towards 
the Gods expressed love towards relations and 
friends. If in all this there was nothing but 
the worship of a more graceful humanity, there 
may be worships much worse as well as much 
better. And the divinest spirit that ever ap- 
peared on earth has told us that the extension 
of human sympathy embraces all that is re- 
quired of us, either to do or to foresee. 

Imagine the feelings with which an ancient 
believer must have gone by the oracular oaks 
of Dodona ; or the calm groves of the Eume- 
nides ; or the fountain where Proserpine 
vanished under ground with Pluto ; or the 
Great Temple of the mysteries at Eleusis ; or 
the laurelled mountain Parnassus, on the side 
of which was the temple of Delphi, where 
Apollo was supposed to be present in person. 
Imagine Plutarch, a devout and yet a liberal 
believer, when he went to study theology and 
philosophy at Delphi : with what feelings 
must he not have passed along the woody 
paths of the hill, approaching nearer every in- 
stant to the divinity, and not sure that a glance 
of light through the trees was not the lustre 
of the god himself going by ! This is mere 
poetry to us, and very fine it is ; but to him it 
was poetry, and religion, and beauty, and 
gravity, and hushing awe, and a path as from 
one world to another. 

With similar feelings he would cross the 
ocean, an element that naturally detaches the 
mind from earth, and which the ancients 
regarded as especially doing so. He had been 
in the Carpathian sea, the favourite haunt of 
Proteus, who was supposed to be gifted above 
every other deity with a knowledge of the 
causes of things. Towards evening, when the 
winds were rising, and the sailors had made 
their vows to Neptune, he would think of the 
old " shepherd of the seas of yore," and believe 
it possible that he might become visible to his 
eyesight, driving through the darkling waters, 
and turning the sacred wildness of his face to- 
wards the blessed ship. 

In all this, there is a deeper sense of another 
world, than in the habit of contenting oneself 
with a few vague terms and embodying nothing 
but Mammon. There is a deeper sense of 
another world, precisely because there is a 
deeper sense of the present ; of its varieties, 
its benignities, its mystery. It was a strong 
sense of this, which made a living poet, who 
is accounted very orthodox in his religious 
opinions, give vent, in that fine sonnet, to his 
impatience at seeing the beautiful planet we 
live upon, with all its starry wonders about it, 
so little thought of, compared with what is 
ridiculously called the world. He seems to 
have dreaded the symptom, as an evidence of 
materialism, and of the planets being dry self- 



GETTING UP ON COLD MORNINGS. 



49 



existing things, peopled with mere successive 
mortalities, and unconnected with any super- 
intendence or consciousness in the universe 
about them. It is abhorrent from all we think 
and feel, that they should be so : and yet 
Love might make heavens of them, if they 



; The world is too much with us. Late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers : 
Little we see in Nature that is ours : 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
The Winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. — Great God ! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



XXIV.— GETTIN&" UP ON COLD 
MORNINj^a^ 

An Italian author — Giu4*e-66rdara, a Jesuit 
— has written a poem upon insects, which he 
begins by insisting, that those troublesome 
and abominable little animals ^were Created 
for our annoyance, and that they Were certainly 
not inhabitants of Paradise. We of the north 
may dispute this piece of theology ; but on the 
other hand, it is as clear as the ^now on the 
house-tops, that Adam was -not under the 
necessity of shaving ; and that when Eve 
walked out of her delicious bower, she did not 
step upon ice three inches thick. 

Some people say it is a very easy thing to 
get up of a cold morning. You have only, 
they tell you, to take the resolution ; and the 
thing is done. This may be very true ; just 
as a boy at school has only to take a flogging, 
and the thing is over. But we have not at all 
made up our minds upon it ; and we find it a 
very pleasant exercise to discuss the matter, 
candidly, before we get up. This at least is 
not idling, though it may be lying. It affords 
an excellent answer to those, who ask how 
lying in bed can be indulged in by a reasoning 
being, — a rational creature. How ? "Why 
with the argument calmly at work in one's 
head, and the clothes over one's shoulder. Oh 
—it is a fine way of spending a sensible, 
impartial half-hour. 

If these people would be more charitable, 
they would get on with their argument better. 
But they are apt to reason so ill, and to assert 
so dogmatically, that one could wish to have 
them stand round one's bed of a bitter morn- 
ing, and lie before their faces. They ought to 
hear both sides of the bed, the inside and out. 
If they cannot entertain themselves with their 
own thoughts for half an hour or so, it is not 
the fault of those who can. 



Candid inquiries into one's decumbency, 
besides the greater or less privileges to be 
allowed a man in proportion to his ability of 
keeping early hours, the work given his facul- 
ties, &c. will at least concede their due merits 
to such representations as the following. In 
the first place, says the injured but calm 
appealer, I have been warm all night, and find 
my system in a state perfectly suitable to a 
warm-blooded animal. To get out of this state 
into the cold, besides the inharmonious and 
uncritical abruptness of the transition, is so 
unnatural to such a creature, that the poets, 
refining upon the tortures of the damned, 
make one of their greatest agonies consist in 
being suddenly transported from heat to cold, 
— from fire to ice. They are " haled" out of 
their "beds," says Milton, by "harpy-footed 
furies," — fellows who come to call them. On 
my first movement towards the anticipation of 
getting up, I find that such parts of the sheets 
and bolster, as are exposed to the air of the 
room, are stone-cold. On opening my eyes, 
the first thing that meets them is my own 
breath rolling forth, as if in the open air, like 
smoke out of a chimney. Think of this symp- 
tom. Then I turn my eyes sideways and see 
the window all frozen over. Think of that. 
Then the servant comes in. " It is very cold 
this morning, is it not ?" — " Very cold, Sir." — 
"Very cold indeed, isn't it ?" — "Very cold in- 
deed, Sir." — "More than usually so, isn't it, 
even for this weather ?" (Here the servant's 
wit and good-nature are put to a considerable 
test, and the inquirer lies on thorns for the 

answer.) " Why, Sir I think it is" 

(Good creature ! There is not a better, or 
more truth-telling servant going.) "I must 
rise, however — get me some warm water." — 
Here comes a fine interval between the depar- 
ture of the servant and the arrival of the hot 
water ; during which, of course, it is of " no 
use ?" to get up. The hot water comes. " Is 
it quite hot ? "— « Yes, Sir."—" Perhaps too hot 
for shaving : I must wait a little ?" — " No 
Sir ; it will just do." (There is an over-nice 
propriety sometimes, an officious zeal of virtue, 
a little troublesome.) " Oh — the shirt — you 
must air my clean shirt ; — linen gets very 
damp this weather." — "Yes, Sir." Here an- 
other delicious five minutes. A knock at the 
door. " Oh, the shirt — very well. My stock- 
ings — I think the stockings had better be aired 
too." — " Very well, Sir." — Here another inter- 
val. At length everything is ready, except 
myself. I now, continues our incumbent (a 
happy word, by the bye, for a country vicar) 
— I now cannot help thinking a good deal — 
who can ? — upon the unnecessary and villan- 
ous custom of shaving : it is a thing so unmanly 
(here I nestle closer) — so effeminate (here I 
recoil from an unlucky step into the colder 
part of the bed.) — No wonder that the Queen 
of France took part with the rebels against 



50 



THE INDICATOR. 



that degenerate King, her husband, who first 
affronted her smooth visage with a face like 
her own. The Emperor Julian never showed 
the luxuriancy of his genius to better advan- 
tage than in reviving the flowing beard. Look 
at Cardinal Bembo's picture — at Michael 
Angelo's — at Titian's — at Shakspeare's — at 
Fletcher's — at Spenser's — at Chaucer's — at 
Alfred's— at Plato's — I could name a great 
man for every tick of my watch. — Look at the 
Turks, a grave and otiose people. — Think of 
Haroun Al Raschid and Bed-ridden Hassan. — 
Think of Wortley Montague, the worthy son 
of his mother, above the prejudice of his time 
— Look at the Persian gentlemen, whom one is 
ashamed of meeting about the suburbs, their 
dress and appearance are so much finer than 
our own — Lastly, think of the razor itself — 
how totally opposed to every sensation of bed 
— how cold, how edgy, how hard ! how utterly 
different from anything like the warm and 
circling amplitude, which 

Sweetly recommends itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 

Add to this, benumbed fingers, which may 
help you to cut yourself, a quivering body, a fro- 
zen towel, and a ewer full of ice ; and he that 
says there is nothing to oppose in all this, only 
shows, that he has no merit in opposing it. 

Thomson the poet, who exclaims in his 
Seasons — 

Falsely luxurious ! Will not man awake ? 

used to lie in bed till noon, because he said he 
had no motive in getting up. He could imagine 
the good of rising ; but then he could also 
imagine the good of lying still ; and his ex- 
clamation, it must be allowed, was made upon 
summer-time, not winter. We must propor- 
tion the argument to the individual character. 
A money-getter may be drawn out of his bed 
by three or four pence ; but this will not suf- 
fice for a student. A proud man may say, 
" What shall I think of myself, if I don't get 
up ? " but the more humble one will be content 
to waive this prodigious notion of himself, out 
of respect to his kindly bed. The mechanical 
man shall get up without any ado at all ; and 
so shall the barometer. An ingenious lier in 
bed will find hard matter of discussion even 
on the score of health and longevity. He will 
ask us for our proofs and precedents of the ill 
effects of lying later in cold weather ; and so- 
phisticate much on the advantages of an even 
temperature of body; of the natural propensity 
(pretty universal) to have one's way ; and of 
the animals that roll themselves up, and sleep 
all the winter. As to longevity, he will ask 
whether the longest is of necessity the best ; 
and whether Holborn is the handsomest street 
in London. 



XXV.— THE OLD GENTLEMAN. 

Our Old Gentleman, in order to be exclu- 
sively himself, must be either a widower or a 
bachelor. Suppose the former. We do not 
mention his precise age, which would be invi- 
dious : — nor whether he wears his own hair or 
a wig ; which would be wanting in universality. 
If a wig, it is a compromise between the more 
modern scratch and the departed glory of the 
toupee. If his own hair, it is white, in spite of 
his favourite grandson, who used to get on the 
chair behind him, and pull the silver hairs out, 
ten years ago. If he is bald at top, the hair- 
dresser, hovering and breathing about him like 
a second youth, takes care to give the bald 
place as much powder as the covered ; in order 
that he may convey to the sensorium within a 
pleasing indistinctness of idea respecting the 
exact limits of skin and hair. He is very clean 
and neat ; and, in warm weather, is proud of 
opening his waistcoat half-way down, and 
letting so much of his frill be seen, in order to 
show his hardiness as well as taste. His watch 
and shirt-buttons are of the best ; and he does 
not care if he has two rings on a finger. If his 
watch ever failed him at the club or coffee- 
house, he would take a walk every day to the 
nearest clock of good character, purely to keep 
it right. He has a cane at home, but seldom 
uses it, on finding it out of fashion with his 
elderly juniors. He has a small cocked hat for 
gala days, which he lifts higher from his head 
than the round one, when bowed to. In his 
pockets are two handkerchiefs (one for the 
neck at night-time), his spectacles, and his 
pocket-book. The pocket-book, among other 
things, contains a receipt for a cough, and 
some verses cut out of an odd sheet of an old 
magazine, on the lovely Duchess of A., begin- 
ning— 

When beauteous Mira walks the^plain. 

He intends this for a common-place book which 
he keeps, consisting of passages in verse and 
proSe, cut out of newspapers and magazines, 
and pasted in columns ; some of them rather 
gay. His principal other books are Shakspeare's 
Plays and Milton's Paradise Lost ; the Spec- 
tator, the History of England, the Works of 
Lady M. W. Montague, Pope and Churchill ; 
Middleton's Geography ; the Gentleman's Ma- 
gazine ; Sir John Sinclair on Longevity ; 
several plays with portraits in character ; 
Account of Elizabeth Canning, Memoirs of 
George Ann Bellamy, Poetical Amusements at 
Bath-Easton, Blair's Works, Elegant Extracts ; 
Junius as originally published ; a few pamph- 
lets on the American War and Lord George 
Gordon, &c. and one on the French Revolution. 
In his sitting-rooms are some engravings from 
Hogarth and Sir Joshua ; an engraved portrait 
of the Marquis of Granby ; ditto of M. le Comte 
de Grasse surrendering to Admiral Rodney ; 



THE OLD GENTLEMAN. 



51 



a humorous piece after Penny ; and a portrait 
of himself, painted by Sir Joshua. His wife's 
portrait is in his chamber, looking upon his 
bed. She is a little girl, stepping forward with 
a smile, and a pointed toe, as if going to dance. 
He lost her when she was sixty. 

The Old Gentleman is an early riser, because 
he intends to live at least twenty years longer. 
He continues to take tea for breakfast, in spite of 
what is said against its nervous effects ; having 
been satisfied on that point some years ago by 
Dr. Johnson's criticism on Hanway, and a great 
liking for tea previously. His china cups and 
saucers have been broken since his wife's death, 
all but one, which is religiously kept for his 
use. He passes his morning in walking or 
riding, looking in at auctions, looking after his 
India bonds or some such money securities, 
furthering some subscription set on foot by his 
excellent friend Sir John, or cheapening a new 
old print for his portfolio. He also hears of 
the newspapers ; not caring to see them till 
after dinner at the coffee-house. He may also 
cheapen a fish or so ; the fishmonger soliciting 
his doubting eye as he passes, with a profound 
bow of recognition. He eats a pear before 
dinner. 

His dinner at the coffee-house is served up 
to him at the accustomed hour, in the old 
accustomed way, and by the accustomed waiter. 
If William did not bring it, the fish would be sure 
to be stale, and the flesh new. He eats no tart ; 
or if he ventures on a little, takes cheese with 
it. You might as soon attempt to persuade 
him out of his senses, as that cheese is not good 
for digestion. He takes port ; and if he has 
drunk more than usual, and in a more private 
place, may be induced by some respectful in- 
quiries respecting the old style of music, to sing 
a song composed by Mr. Oswald or Mr. Lampe, 
such as — 

Chloe, by that borrowed kiss, 



or 



Come, gentle god of soft repose, 



or his wife's favourite ballad, beginning — 

At Upton on the hill, 
There lived a happy pair. 

Of course, no such exploit can take place in 
the coffee-room : but he will canvass the theory 
of that matter there with yon, or discuss the 
weather, or the markets, or the theatres, or the 
merits of " my lord North" or " my lord Rock- 
ingham ;" for he rarely says simply, lord ; it is 
generally " my lord," trippingly and genteelly 
off the tongue. If alone after dinner, his great 
delight is the newspaper ; which he prepares 
to read by wiping his spectacles, carefully ad- 
justing them on his eyes, and drawing the can- 
dle close to him, so as to stand sideways betwixt 
his ocular aim and the small type. He then 
holds the paper at arm's length, and dropping 
his eyelids half down and his mouth half open, 



takes cognizance of the day's information. If 
he leaves off, it is only when the door is opened 
by a new-comer, or when he suspects some- 
body is over -anxious to get the paper out of his 
hand. On these occasions he gives an impor- 
tant hem ! or so ; and resumes. 

In the evening, our Old Gentleman is fond 
of going to the theatre, or of having a game of 
cards. If he enjoys the latter at his own house 
or lodgings, he likes to play with some friends 
whom he has known for many years ; but an 
elderly stranger may be introduced, if quiet 
and scientific ; and the privilege is extended to 
younger men of letters ; who, if ill players, are 
good losers. Not that he is a miser, but to 
win money at cards is like proving his victory 
by getting the baggage ; and to win of a 
younger man is a substitute for his not being 
able to beat him at rackets. He breaks up 
early, whether at home or abroad. 

At the theatre, he likes a front row in the 
pit. He comes early, if he can do so without 
getting into a squeeze, and sits patiently 
waiting for the drawing up of the curtain, with 
his hands placidly lying one over the other on 
the top of his stick. He generously admires 
some of the best performers, but thinks them 
far inferior to Garrick, Woodward, and Clive. 
During splendid scenes, he is anxious that the 
little boy should see. 

He has been induced to look in at Vauxhali 
again, but likes it still less than he did years 
back, and cannot bear it in comparison with 
Ranelagh. He thinks everything looks poor, 
flaring, and jaded. " Ah ! " says he, with a sort 
of triumphant sigh, "Ranelagh was a noble 
place ! Such taste, such elegance, such beauty ! 
There was the Duchess of A., the finest woman 
in England, Sir ; and Mrs. L., a mighty fine 
creature ; and Lady Susan what's her name, 
that had that unfortunate affair with Sir 
Charles. Sir, they came swimming by you like 
the swans." 

The Old Gentleman is very particular in 
having his slippers ready for him at the fire, 
when he comes home. He is also extremely 
choice in his snuff, and delights to get a fresh 
box-full in Tavistock-street, in his way to the 
theatre. His box is a curiosity from India. 
He calls favourite young ladies by their Chris- 
tian names, however slightly acquainted with 
them ; and has a privilege of saluting all brides, 
mothers, and indeed every species of lady, on 
the least holiday occasion. If the husband for 
instance has met with a piece of luck, he 
instantly moves forward, and gravely kisses the 
wife on the cheek. The wife then says, " My 
niece, Sir, from the country ;" and he kisses 
the niece. The niece, seeing her cousin biting 
her lips at the joke, says, "My cousin Harriet, 
Sir ;" and he kisses the cousin. He " never 
recollects such weather," except during the 
"Great Frost," or when he rode down with 
" Jack Skrimshire to Newmarket." He grows 

E 2 



52 



THE INDICATOR. 



young again in his little grand-children, espe- 
cially the one which he thinks most like him- 
self ; which is the handsomest. Yet he likes 
best perhaps the one most resembling his wife ; 
and will sit with him on his lap, holding his 
hand in silence, for a quarter of an hour 
together. He plays most tricks with the 
former, and makes him sneeze. He asks little 
boys in general who was the father of Zebedee's 
children. If his grandsons are at school, he 
often goes to see them ; and makes them blush 
by telling the master or the upper-scholars, 
that they are fine boys, and of a precocious 
genius. He is much struck when an old ac- 
quaintance dies, but adds that he lived too 
fast ; and that poor Bob was a sad dog in his 
youth ; " a very sad dog, Sir ; mightily set 
upon a short life and a merry one.'' 

When he gets very old indeed, he will sit 
for whole evenings, and say little or nothing ; 
but informs you, that there is Mrs. Jones (the 
housekeeper) — "She'll talk." 



XXVI. DOLPHINS. 

Our old book-friend, the Dolphin, used to be 
confounded with the porpus ; but modern 
writers seem to concur in making a distinction 
between them. "We remember being much 
mortified at this separation ; for having, in our 
childhood, been shown something dimly rolling 
in the sea, while standing on the coast at twi- 
light, and told with much whispering solemnity 
that it was a porpus, we had afterwards learnt 
to identify it with the Dolphin, and thought 
we had seen the romantic fish on whom Arion 
rode playing his harp. 

Spenser introduces Arion most beautifully, 
in all his lyrical pomp, in the marriage of 
the Thames and Medway. He goes before 
the bride, smoothing onwards with the sound 
of his harp, like the very progress of the 
water. 

Then there was heard a most celestiall sound 
Of dainty musicke, which did next ensue 
Before the Spouse. That was Avion crowned : 
Who, playing on his harp, unto him drew 
The eares and hearts of all that goodly crew ; 
That even yet the Dolphin, which him bore 
Through the iEgean seas from pirates' view, 
Stood still by him astonished at his lore ; 
And all the raging seas for joy forgot to roar. 

So went he> playing on the watery plain. 

Perhaps in no one particular thing or image, 
have some great poets shown the different 
characters of their genius more than in the use 
of the Dolphin. Spenser, who of all his tribe 
lived in a poetical world, and saw things as 
clearly there as in a real one, has never shown 
this nicety of realisation more than in the 
following passage. He speaks of his Dolphins 
with as familiar a detail, as if they were horses 
waiting at a door with an equipage. 



A team of Dolphins ranged in array 
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent. 
They were all taught by Triton to obey 
To the long reins at her commandement : 
As swift as swallows on the waves they went, 
That their broad flaggy finnes no foam did reare, 
Ne bubbling roundell they behind them sent. 
The rest of other fishes drawen were, 
Which with their finny oares the swelling sea did sheare. 

Soon as they been arrived upon the brim 

Of the Rich Strand, their charets they forlore ; 

And let then- teamed fishes softly swim 

Along the margent of the foamy shore, 

Lest they their finnes should bruise, and surbeat sore 

Their tender feete upon the stony ground. 

There are a couple of Dolphins like these, in 
Raphael's Galatea. Dante, with his tendency 
to see things in a dreary point of view, has 
given an illustration of the agonies of some of 
the damned in his Inferno, at once new, fine, 
and horrible. It is in the 22d book, " Come i del- 
fini" &c. He says that some wretches, swimming 
in one of the gulfs of hell, shot out their 
backs occasionally, like Dolphins, a.bove the 
pitchy liquid, in order to snatch a respite from 
torment ; but darted them back again like 
lightning. The devils would prong them as 
they rose. Strange fancies these for main- 
taining the character of religion ! 

Hear Shakspeare, always the noble and the 
good-natured. We forget of what great cha- 
racter he is speaking ; but never was an image 
that more singularly yet completely united 
superiority and playfulness. 

His delights 
Were dolphin-like ; and showed themselves above 
The element he lived in. 



XXVII.— RONALD OF THE PERFECT 
HAND. 

[The following tale is founded on a Scottish tradition. 
It was intended to be written in verse ; which will account 
for its present appearance.] 

The stern old shepherd of the air, 
The spirit of the whistling hair, 
The wind, has risen drearily 
In the Northern evening sea, 
And is piping long and loud 
To many a heavy upcoming cloud, — 
Upcoming heavy in many a row, 
Like the unwieldy droves below 
Of seals and horses of the sea, 
That gather up as drearily, 
And watch with solemn-visaged eyes 
Those mightier movers in the skies. 

'Tis evening quick ; — 'tis night :— the rain 
Is sowing wide the fruitless main, 
Thick, thick ; — no sight remains the while 
From the farthest Orkney isle, 
No sight to sea-horse, or to seer, 
But of a little pallid sail, 
That seems as if 'twould struggle near, 
And then as if its pinion pale 
Gave up the battle to the gale. 
Four chiefs there are of special note, 
Labouring in that earnest boat ; 



RONALD OF THE PERFECT HAND. 



53 



Four Orkney chiefs, that yesterday 

Coming in their pride away 

Prom there smote Norwegian king, 

Led their war boats triumphing 

Straight along the golden line 

Made by morning's eye divine. 

Stately came they, one by one, 

Every sail beneath the sun, 

As if he their admiral were 

Looking down from the lofty air, 

Stately, stately through the gold. — 

But before that day was done, 

Lo, his eye grew vexed and cold ; 

And every boat, except that one, 

A tempest trampled in its roar ; 

And every man, except those four, 

Was drenched, and driving far from home, 

Dead and swift, through the Northern foam. 

Four are they, who wearily 
Have drunk of toil two days at sea ; 
Duth Maruno, steady and dark, 
Cormar, Soul of the Winged Bark ; 
And bright Clan Alpin, who could leap 
Like a torrent from steep to steep ; 
And he, the greatest of that great band, 
Ronald of the Perfect Hand. 

Dumbly strain they for the shore, 
Foot to board, and grasp on oar. 
The billows, panting in the wind, 
Seem instinct with ghastly mind, 
And climb like crowding savages 
At the boat that dares their seas. 
Dumbly strain they through and through, 
Dumbly, and half blindly too, 
Drenched, and buffeted, and bending 
Up and down without an ending, 
Like ghostly things that could not cease 
To row among those savages. 

Ronald of the Perfect Hand 

Has rowed the most of all that band ; 

And now he's resting for a space 

At the helm, and turns his face 

Round and round on every side 

To see what cannot be descried, 

Shore, nor sky, nor light, nor even 

Hope, whose feet are last in heaven. 

Ronald thought him of the roar 

Of the fight the day before, 

And of the young Norwegian prince 

Whom in all the worryings 

And hot vexations of the fray, 

He had sent with life away, 

Because he told him of a bride 

That if she lost him, would have died ; 

And Ronald then, in bitter case, 

Thought of his own sweet lady's face, 

Which upon this very night 

Should have blushed with bridal light, 

And of her downward eyelids meek, 

And of her voice, just heard to speak, 

As at the altar, hand in hand, 

On ceasing of the organ grand, 

'Twould have bound her for weal or woe, 

With delicious answers low : 

And more he thought of, grave and sweet, 

That made the thin tears start, and meet 

The wetting of the insolent wave ; 

And Ronald, who though all so brave, 

Had often that hard day before 

Wished himself well housed on shore, 

Felt a sharp impatient start 

Of home-sick wilfulness at heart, 

And steering with still firmer hand, 

As if the boat could feel command, 

Thrill'd with a fierce and forward motion, 

As though 'twould shoot it through the ocean. 



" Some spirit," exclaimed Duth Maruno, 
" must pursue us, and stubbornly urge the boat 
out of its way, or we must have arrived by this 
time at Inistore."* Ronald took him at his 
word, and turning hastily round, thought he 
saw an armed figure behind the stern. His 
anger rose with his despair ; and with all his 
strength he dashed his arm at the moveless 
and airy shape. At that instant a fierce blast 
of wind half turned the boat round. The 
chieftains called out to Ronald to set his whole 
heart at the rudder ; but the wind beat back 
their voices, like young birds into the nest, 
and no answer followed it. The boat seemed 
less and less manageable, and at last to be 
totally left to themselves. In the intervals of 
the wind they again called out to Ronald, but 
still received no answer. One of them crept 
forward, and felt for him through the blinding 
wet and darkness. His place was void. " It 
was a ghost," said they, " which came to fetch 
him to the spirits of his fathers. Ronald of 
the Perfect Hand is gone, and we shall follow 
him as we did in the fight. Hark ! the wind 
is louder and louder : it is louder and many- 
voiced. Is it bis voice which has roused up 
the others ? Is he calling upv,n us, as he did 
in the battle, when his followers shouted after 
his call?" 

It was the rocks of an isle beyond Inistore, 
which made that multitudinous roaring cf the 
wind. The chieftains found that they were 
not destined to perish in the mid-ccean ; but 
it was fortunate for them that the wind did 
not set in directly upon the island, or they 
would have been dashed to pieces upon the 
rocks. With great difficulty they stemmed 
their way obliquely ; and at length were thrown 
violently to shore, bruised, wounded, and half 
inanimate. They remained on this desolate 
island two days, during the first of which the 
storm subsided. On the third, they were taken 
away by a boat of seal-hunters. 

The chiefs, on their arrival at home, related 
how Ronald of the Perfect Hand had been 
summoned away by a loud-voiced spirit, and 
disappeared. Great was the mourning in 
Inistore for the Perfect Hand ; for the Hand 
that with equal skill could throw the javelin 
and traverse the harp ; could build the sudden 
hut of the hunter ; and. bind up the glad locks 
of the maiden tired in the dance. Therefore 
was he called the Perfect Hand ; and therefore 
with great mourning was he mourned : yet 
with none half as great as by his love, his 
betrothed bride Moilena ; by her of the Beau- 
tiful Voice ; who had latterly begun to be 
called the Perfect Voice, because she was to 
be matched with him of the Perfect Hand. 
Perfect Hand and Perfect Voice were they 
called ; but the Hand was now gone, and the 
Voice sang brokenly for tears. 

A dreary winter was it though a victorious. 
*" The old name for the Orkneys, 



54 



THE INDICATOR. 



to the people of Inistore. Their swords had 
conquered in Lochlin ; but most of the hands 
that wielded them had never come back. 
Their warm pressure was felt no more. The 
last which they had given their friends was 
now to serve them all their lives. " Never, 
with all my yearning," said Moilena, " shall I 
look upon his again, as I have looked upon it 
a hundred times, when nobody suspected. 
Never." And she turned from the sight of 
the destructive ocean, which seemed as inter- 
minable as her thoughts. 

But winter had now passed away. The tears 
of the sky at least were dried up. The sun 
looked out kindly again ; and the spring had 
scarcely re-appeared, when Inistore had a 
proud and gladder day, from the arrival of the 
young prince of Lochlin with his bride. It 
was a bitter one to Moilena, for the prince 
came to thank Ronald for sparing his life in 
the war, and had brought his lady to thank 
him too. They thanked Moilena instead ; 
and, proud in the midst of her unhappiness, of 
being the representative of the Perfect Hand, 

j she lavished hundreds of smiles upon them 
from her pale face. But she wept in secret. 
She could not bear this new addition to the 

I store of noble and kind memories respecting 
her Ronald. He had spared the bridegroom 
for his bride. He had hoped to come back to 
his own. She looked over to the north ; and 
thought that her home was as much there as in 
Inistore. 

Meantime, Ronald was not drowned. A 
Scandinavian boat, bound for an island called 
the Island of the Circle, had picked him up. 
The crew, which consisted chiefly of priests, 
were going thither to propitiate the deities, on 
account of the late defeat of their country- 
men. They recognised the victorious chieftain, 
who on coming to his senses freely confessed 
who he was. Instantly they raised a chorus, 
which rose sternly through the tempest. " We 
carry," said they, " an acceptable present to 
the gods. Odin, stay thy hand from the 
slaughter of the obscure. Thor, put down the 
mallet with which thou beatest, like red hail, 
on the skulls of thine enemies. Ye other 
feasters in Valhalla, set down the skulls full of 
mead, and pledge a health out of a new and 
noble one to the King of Gods and Men, that 
the twilight of heaven may come late. We 
bring an acceptable present : we bring Ronal'd 
of the Perfect Hand." Thus they sang in the 
boat, labouring all the while with the winds 
and waves, but surer now than ever of reach- 
ing the shore. And they did so by the first 
light of the morning. When they came to the 
circie of sacred stones, from which the island 
took its name, they placed their late conqueror 
by the largest, and kindled a fire in the middle. 
The warm smoke rose thickly against the cold 
white morning. " Let me be offered up to 
your gods," said Ronald, " like a man, by the 



sword ; and not like food, by the fire." " We 
know all," answered the priests : " be thou 
silent." " Treat not him," said Ronald, " who 
spared your prince, unworthily. If he must 
be sacrificed, let him die as your prince would 
have died by this hand." Still they answered 
nothing but " We know all : be thou silent." 
Ronald could not help witnessing these pre- 
parations for a new and unexpected death with 
an emotion of terror ; but disdain and despair 
were uppermost. Once, and but once, his 
cheek turned deadly pale in thinking of 
Moilena. He shifted his posture resolutely, 
and thought of the spirits of the dead whom 
he was about to join. The priests then encir- 
cled the fire and the stone at which he stood, 
with another devoting song ; and Ronald 
looked earnestly at the ruddy flames, which 
gave to his body, as in mockery, a kindly 
warmth. The priests, however, did not lay 
hands on him. They respected the sparer of 
their prince so far as not to touch him them- 
selves ; they left him to be despatched by the 
supernatural beings, whom they confidently 
expected to come down for that purpose as 
soon as they had retired. 

Ronald, whose faith was of another descrip- 
tion, saw their departure with joy ; but it was 
damped the next minute. What was he to do 
in winter-time on an island, inhabited only by 
the fowls and other creatures of the northern 
sea, and never touched at but for a purpose 
hostile to his hopes ? For he now recollected, 
that this was the island he had so often 
heard of, as the chief seat of the Scandinavian 
religion ; whose traditions had so influenced 
countries of a different faith, that it was be- 
lieved in Scotland as well as the continent, 
that no human being could live there many 
hours. Spirits, it was thought appeared in 
terrible superhuman shapes, like the bloody 
idols which the priests worshipped, and car- 
ried the stranger off. 

The warrior of Inistore had soon too much 
reason to know the extent of this belief. 
He was not without fear himself, but dis- 
dained to yield to any circumstances with- 
out a struggle. He refreshed himself with 
some snow-water ; and after climbing the 
highest part of the island to look for a boat 
in vain (nothing was to be seen but the waves 
tumbling on all sides after the storm), he 
set about preparing a habitation. He saw 
at a little distance, on a slope, the mouth of a 
rocky cave. This he destined for his shelter 
at night ; and looking round for a defence for 
the door, as he knew not whether bears might 
not be among the inhabitants, he cast his eyes 
upon the thinnest of the stones which stood 
upright about the fire. The heart of the war- 
rior, though of a different faith, misgave him 
as he thought of appropriating this mystical 
stone, carved full of strange figures ; but half in 
courage, and half in the despair of fear, he sud- 



RONALD OF THE PERFECT HAND. 



55 



denly twisted it from its place. No one ap- 
peared. The fire altered not. The noise of 
the fowl and other creatures was no louder on 
the shore. Ronald smiled at his fears, and 
knew the undiminished vigour of the Perfect 
Hand. 

He found the cavern already fitted for shel- 
ter ; doubtless by the Scandinavian priests. 
He had bitter reason to know how well it 
sheltered him ; for day after day he hoped in 
vain that some boat from Inistore would 
venture upon the island. He beheld sails at 
a distance, but they never came. He piled 
stone upon stone, joined old pieces of boats 
together, and made flags of the sea-weed ; but 
all in vain. The vessels, he thought, came 
nearer, but none so near as to be of use ; 
and a new and sickly kind of impatience cut 
across the stout heart of Ronald, and set it 
beating. He knew not whether it was with the 
cold or with misery, but his frame would shake 
for an hour together, when he lay down on his 
dried weeds and feathers to rest. He re- 
membered the happy sleeps that used to fol- 
low upon toil ; and he looked with double 
activity for the eggs and shell-fish on which he 
sustained himself, and smote double the num- 
ber of seals, half in the very exercise of his 
anger : and then he would fall dead asleep 
with fatigue. 

In this way he bore up agamstthe violences of 
the winter season, which had now passed. The 
sun looked out with a melancholy smile upon 
the moss and the poor grass, chequered here 
and there with flowers almost as poor. There 
was the buttercup, struggling from a dirty 
white into a yellow ; and a faint-coloured 
poppy, neither the good nor the ill of which was 
then known ; and here and there by the thorny 
underwood a shrinking violet. The lark alone 
seemed cheerful, and startled the ear of the 
desolate chieftain with its climbing triumph in 
the air. Ronald looked up. His fancy had been 
made wild and wilful by strange habits and 
sickened blood ; and he thought impatiently, 
that if he were up there like the lark, he might 
see his friends and his love in Inistore. 

Being naturally, however, of a gentle as well 
as courageous disposition, the Perfect Hand 
found the advantage as well as the necessity of 
turning his violent impulses into noble matter 
for patience. He had heard of the dreadful 
bodily sufferings which the Scandinavian heroes 
underwent from their enemies with triumphant 
songs. He knew that no such sufferings which 
were fugitive, could equal the agonies of a 
daily martyrdom of mind ; and he cultivated 
a certain humane pride of patience, in order to 
bear them. 

His only hope of being delivered from the 
island now depended on the Scandinavian 
priests ; but it was a moot point whether they 
would respect him for surviving, or kill him on 
that very account, out of a mixture of personal 



and superstitious resentment. He thought his 
death the more likely ; but this, at least, was a 
termination to the dreary prospect of a solitude 
for life ; and partly out of that hope, and partly 
from a courageous patience, he cultivated as 
many pleasant thoughts and objects about him 
as he could. He adorned his cavern with shells 
and feathers ; he made himself a cap and cloak 
of the latter, and boots and a vest of seal-skin, 
girding it about with the glossy sea- weed ; he 
cleared away a circle before the cavern, planted 
it with the best grass, and heaped about it the 
mossiest stones : he strung some bones of a fish 
with sinews, and fitting a shell beneath it, the 
Perfect Hand drew forth the first gentle music 
that had been heard in that wild island. He 
touched it one day in the midst of a flock of 
seals, who were basking in the sun ; they 
turned their heads towards the sound ; he 
thought he saw in their mild faces a human 
expression ; and from that day forth no seal 
was ever slain by the Perfect Hand. He spared 
even the huge and cloudy visaged-walrusses, 
in whose societies he beheld a dull resemblance 
to the gentler affections ; and his new intimacy 
with these possessors of the place was com- 
pleted by one of the former animals, who 
having been rescued by him from a contest with 
a larger one, followed him about, as well as its 
half-formed and dragging legs would allow, with 
the officious attachment of a dog. 

But the summer was gone, and no one had 
appeared. The new thoughts and deeper in- 
sight into things, which solitude and sorrowful 
necessity had produced, together with a dimi- 
nution of his activity, had not tended to 
strengthen him against the approach of winter : 
and autumn came upon him like the melancholy 
twilight of the year. He had now no hope of 
seeing even the finishers of his existence 
before the spring. The rising winds among the 
rocks, and the noise of the whales blowing up 
their spouts of water, till the caverns thundered 
with their echoes, seemed to be like heralds of 
the stern season which was to close him in 
against approach. He had tried one day to 
move the stone at the mouth of his habitation 
a little further in, and found his strength fail 
him. He laid himself half reclining on the 
ground, full of such melancholy thoughts as 
half bewildered him. Things, by turns, ap- 
peared a fierce dream, and a fiercer reality. 
He was leaning and looking on the ground, and 
idly twisting his long hair, when his eyes fell 
upon the hand that held it. It was livid and 
emaciated. He opened and shut it, opened and 
shut it again, turned it round, and looked at 
its ribbed thinness and laid-open machinery ; 
many thoughts came upon him, some which he 
understood not, and some which he recognised 
but too well ; and a turbid violence seemed 
rising at his heart, when the seal, his companion, 
drew nigh, and began licking that weak memo- 
rial of the Perfect Hand. A shower of self- 



THE INDICATOR. 



pitying tears fell upon the seal's face and the 
hand together. 

On a sudden he heard a voice. It was a deep 
and loud one, and distinctly called out 
" Ronald ! " He looked up, gasping with 
wonder. Three times it called out, as if with 
peremptory command, and three times the 
rocks and caverns echoed the word with a dim 
sullenness. 

Recollecting himself, he would have risen 
and answered ; but the sudden change of sen- 
sations had done what all his sufferings had not 
been able to do, and he found himself unable 
either to rise or to speak. The voice called 
again and again ; but it was now more distant, 
and Ronald's heart sickened as he heard it re- 
treating. His strength seemed to fail him in 
proportion as it became necessary. Suddenly 
the voice came back again. It advances. 
Other voices are heard, all advancing. In a 
short time, figures come hastily down the slope 
by the side of his cavern, looking over into the 
area before it as they descend. They enter. 
They are before him and about him. Some of 
them, in a Scandinavian habit, prostrate them- 
selves at his feet, and address him in an un- 
known language. But these are sent away by 
another, who remains with none but two youths. 
Ronald has risen a little, and leans his back 
against the rock. One of the youths puts his 
arm between his neck and the rock, and half 
kneels beside him, turning his face away and 
weeping. " I am no god, nor a favourite of 
gods, as these people supposed me," said Ronald, 
looking up at the chief who was speaking to the 
other youth : " if thou wilt despatch me then, 
do so. I only pray thee to let the death be fit 
for a warrior, such as I once was." The chief 
appeared agitated. "Speak not ill of the gods, 
Ronald," said he, " although thou wert blindly 
brought up. A warrior like thee must be a 
favourite of heaven. I come to prove it to thee. 
Dost thou not know me ? I come to give thee 
life for life." Ronald looked more steadfastly. 
It was the Scandinavian prince whom he had 
spared, because of his bride, in battle. He 
smiled, and lifted up his hand to him, which 
was intercepted and kissed by the youth who 
held his arm round his neck. " Who are these 
fair youths ? " said Ronald, half turning his 
head to look in his supporter's face. " This is 
the bride I spoke of," answered the prince, 
" who insisted on sharing this voyage with me, 
and put on this dress to be the bolder in it." 
"And who is the other ?" The other, with dried 
eyes, looked smiling into his, and intercepted 
the answer also. "Who," said the sweetest 
voice in the world, " can it be, but one ?" 
With a quick and almost fierce tone, Ronald 
cried out aloud, " I know the voice ;" and he 
would have fallen flat on the earth, if they had 
not all three supported him. 

It was a mild return to Inistore, Ronald 
gathering strength all the way, at the eyes and 



voice of Moilena, and the hands of all three. 
Their discovery of him was easily explained. 
The crews of the vessels, who had been afraid 
to come nearer, had repeatedly seen a figure on 
the island making signs. The Scandinavian 
priests related how they had left Ronald there ; 
but insisted that no human being conld live 
upon it, and that some god wished to manifest 
himself to his faithful worshippers. The heart 
of Moilena was quick to guess the truth. The 
prince proposed to accompany the priests. His 
bride and the destined bride of his saviour 
went with him, and returned as you heard ; 
and from that day forth many were the songs 
in Inistore, upon the fortunes of the Perfect 
Hand and the kindness of the Perfect Voice. 
Nor were those forgotten who forgot not others. 



XXVIII.— A CHAPTER ON HATS. 

We know not what will be thought of our 
taste in so important a matter, but we must 
confess we are not fond of a new hat. There 
is a certain insolence about it : it seems to 
value itself upon its finished appearance, and 
to presume upon our liking before we are 
acquainted with it. In the first place, it comes 
home more like a marmot or some other living 
creature, than a manufacture. It is boxed up, 
and wrapt in silver paper, and brought deli- 
cately. It is as sleek as a lap-dog. Then we 
are to take it out as nicely, and people are to 
wonder how we shall look in it. Maria twitches 
one this way, and Sophia that, and Caroline 
that, and Catharine t'other. We have the 
difficult task, all the while, of looking easy, till 
the approving votes are pronounced ; our only 
resource (which is also difficult) being to say 
good things to all four ; or to clap the hat upon 
each of their heads, and see what pretty milk- 
women they make. At last the approving 
votes are pronounced ; and (provided it is fine) 
we may go forth. But how uneasy the sen- 
sation about the head ! How unlike the old 
hat, to which we had become used, and which 
must now make way for this fop of a stranger ! 
We might do what we liked with the former. 
Dust, rain, a gale of wind, a fall, a squeeze, — 
nothing affected it. It was a true friend, a 
friend for all weathers. Its appearance only 
was against it : in everything else it was the 
better for wear. But if the roads or the streets 
are too dry, the new hat is afraid of getting 
dusty : if there is wind, and it is not tight, it 
may be blown off into the dirt : we may have 
to scramble after it through dust or mud ; 
just reaching it with our fingers, only to see it 
blown away again. And if rain comes on ! Oh 
ye gallant apprentices, who have issued forth 
on a Sunday morning, with Jane or Susan, 
careless either of storms at night-fall, or toils 
and scoldings next day! Ye, who have re- 



A CHAPTER ON HATS. 



57 



ceived your new hat and boots but an hour 
before ye set out ; and then issue forth triumph- 
antly, the charmer by your side ! She, with 
arm in yours, and handkerchief in hand, 
blushing, or eating gingerbread, trips on : ye, 
admiring, trudge : we ask ye, whether love 
itself has prevented ye from feeling a certain 
fearful consciousness of that crowning glory, 
the new and glossy hat, when the first drops of 
rain announce the coming of a shower ? Ah, 
hasten, while yet it is of use to haste ; ere yet 
the spotty horror fixes on the nap ! Out with 
the protecting handkerchief, which, tied round 
the hat, and flowing off in a corner behind, 
shall gleam through the thickening night like 
a suburb comet ! Trust not the tempting yawn 
of stable-yard or gate-way, or the impossible 
notion of a coach ! The rain will continue ; 
and alas ! ye are not so rich as in the morning. 
Hasten ! or think of a new hat's becoming a 
rain-spout ! Think of its well-built crown, its 
graceful and well-measured fit, the curved-up 
elegance of its rim, its shadowing gentility 
when seen in front, its arching grace over the 
ear when beheld sideways ! Think of it also 
the next day ! How altered, how dejected ! 

How changed from him, 
That life of measure and that soul of rim ! 

Think of the paper-like change of its consist- 
ence ; of its limp sadness — its confused and 
flattened nap, and of that polished and perfect 
circle ; which neither brush nor hot iron shall 
restore ! 

We have here spoken of the beauties of a 
new hat ; but abstractedly considered, they 
are very problematical. Fashion makes beauty 
for a time. Our ancestors found a grace in 
the cocked hats now confined to beadles, 
Chelsea pensioners, and coachmen. They 
would have laughed at our chimney-tops with 
a border : though upon the whole we do think 
them the more graceful of the two. The best 
modern covering for the head was the imita- 
tion of the broad Spanish hat in use about 
thirty years back, when Mr. Stothard made 
his designs for the Novelists Magazine. But 
in proportion as society has been put into a 
bustle, our hats seem to have narrowed their 
dimensions : the flaps were clipped off more 
and more till they became a rim ; and now 
the rim has contracted to a mere nothing ; so 
that what with our close heads and our tight 
succinct mode of dress, we look as if we were 
intended for nothing but to dart backwards 
and forwards on matters of business, with as 
little hindrance to each other as possible. 

This may give us a greater distaste to the 
hat than it desenves ; but good-looking or not, 
we know of no situation in which a new one 
can be said to be useful. "We have seen how 
the case is during bad weather : but if the 
weather is in the finest condition possible, 
with neither rain nor dust, there may be a hot 



sunshine ; and then the hat is too narrow to 
shade us : no great evil, it is true ! but we 
must have our pique out against the knave, 
and turn him to the only account in our power : 
— we must write upon him. For every other 
purpose, we hold him as naught. The only 
place a new hat can be carried into with safety, 
is a church ; for there is plenty of room there. 
There also takes place its only union of the 
ornamental with the useful, if so it is to be 
called : we allude to the preparatory ejacu- 
lation whispered into it by the genteel wor- 
shipper, before he turns round and makes a 
bow to Mr. and Mrs. Jones and the Miss 
Thompsons. There is a formula for this occa- 
sion ; and doubtless it is often used, to say 
nothing of extempore effusions : but there are 
wicked imaginations, who suspect that instead 
of devouter whisperings, the communer with 
his lining sometimes ejaculates no more than 
Swallow, St. James's-street ; or, Augarde and 
Spain, Hatters, No. 51, Oxford-street, London : 
— after which he draws up his head with 
infinite gravity and preparation, and makes 
the gentle recognitions aforesaid. 

But wherever there is a crowd, the new hat 
is worse than useless. It is a pity that the 
general retrenchment of people's finances did 
away with the flat opera hat, which was a very 
sensible thing. The round one is only in the 
way. The matting over the floor of the Opera 
does not hinder it from getting dusty ; not to 
mention its chance of a kick from the incon- 
siderate. But from the pit of the other theatres, 
you may bring it away covered with sawdust, 
or rubbed up all the wrong way of the nap, or 
monstrously squeezed into a shapeless lump. 
The least thing to be expected in a pressure, is 
a great poke in its side like a sunken cheek. 

Boating is a mortal enemy to new hats. A 
shower has you fast in a common boat ; or a 
sail-line, or an inexperienced oar, may knock 
the hat off ; and then fancy it tilting over the 
water with the tide, soaked all the while beyond 
redemption, and escaping from the tips of your 
outstretched fingers, while you ought all to be 
pulling the contrary way home. 

But of all wrong boxes for a new hat, avoid 
a mail-coach. If you keep it on, you will begin 
nodding perhaps at midnight, and then it goes 
jamming against the side of the coach, to the 
equal misery of its nap and your own. If you 
take it off, where is its refuge ? Will the 
clergyman take the least heed of it, who is 
snoring comfortably in one corner in his night- 
cap ? Or will the farmer, jolting about inex- 
orably ? Or the regular traveller, who in his 
fur-cap and infinite knowledge of highway 
conveniences, has already beheld it with con- 
tempt ? Or the old market-woman, whom it is 
in vain to request to be tender ? Or the young 
damsel, who wonders how you can think of 
sleeping in such a thing ? In the morning 
you suddenly miss your hat, and ask after it 



58 



THE INDICATOR. 



with trepidation. The traveller smiles. They 
all move their legs, but know nothing of it ; 
till the market-woman exclaims, " Deary me ! 
Well— lord, only think ! A hat is it, Sir ? 
Why I do believe, — but I'm sure I never 
thought o' such a thing more than the child 
unborn, — that it must be a hat then which I 
took for a pan I've been a buying ; and so I've 
had my warm foot in it, Lord help us, ever 
since five o'clock this blessed morning !" 

It is but fair to add, that we happen to have 
an educated antipathy to the hat. At our 
school no hats were worn, and the cap is too 
small to be a substitute. Its only use is to 
astonish the old ladies in the street, who wonder 
how so small a thing can be kept on ; and to 
this end, we used to rub it into the back or 
side of the head, where it hung like a worsted 
wonder. It is after the fashion of Catharine's 
cap in the play : it seems as if 

Moulded on a porringer ; 
"Why, 'tis a cockle, or a walnut-shell, 
A knack, a toy, a trick, a baby's cap ; 
A custard coffin, a bauble. 

But we may not add 

I love thee well, in that thou likest it not ; 

111 befall us, if we ever dislike anything about 
thee, old nurse of our childhood ! How inde- 
pendent of the weather used we to feel in our 
old friar's dress, — our thick shoes, yellow 
worsted stockings, and coarse long coat or 
gown ! Our cap was oftener in our hand than 
on our head, let the weather be what it would. 
We felt a pride as well as pleasure, when every 
body else was hurrying through the streets, in 
receiving the full summer showers with un- 
covered poll, sleekiDg our glad hair bike the 
feathers of a bird. 

It must be said for hats in general, that they 
are a very ancient part of dress, perhaps the 
most ancient ; for a negro, who has nothing 
else upon him, sometimes finds it necessary to 
guard off" the sun with a hat of leaves or straw. 
The Chinese, who carry their records farther 
back than any other people, are a hatted race, 
both narrow-brimmed and broad. We are apt 
to think of the Greeks as a bare-headed people ; 
and they liked to be so ; but they had hats 
for journeying in, such as may be seen on the 
statues of Mercury, who was the god of tra- 
vellers. They were large and flapped, and 
were sometimes fastened round under the chin 
like a lady's bonnet. The Eastern nations 
generally wore turbans, and do still, with the 
exception of the Persians, who have exchanged 
them for large conical caps of felt. The 
Romans copied the Greeks in their dress, as in 
everything else ; but the poorer orders wore a 
cap like their boasted Phrygian ancestors, 
resembling the one which the reader may 
see about the streets upon the bust of Ca- 
n ova's Paris. The others would put their 



robes about their heads upon occasion, — after 
the fashion of the hoods of the middle ages, 
and of the cloth head-dresses which we see in 
the portraits of Dante and Petrarch. Of a 
similar mode are the draperies on the heads of 
our old Plantagenet kings and of Chaucer. 
The velvet cap which succeeded, appears to 
have come from Italy, as seen in the portraits 
of Raphael and Titian ; and it would probably 
have continued till the French times of Charles 
the Second, for our ancestors up to that period 
were great admirers of Italy, had not Philip 
the Second of Spain come over to marry our 
Queen Mary. The extreme heats of Spain 
had forced the natives upon taking to that in- 
genious compound of the hat and umbrella, 
still known by the name of the Spanish hat. 
We know not whether Philip himself wore it. 
His father, Charles the Fifth, who was at the 
top of the world, is represented as delighting 
in a little humble-looking cap. But we con- 
ceive it was either from Philip, or some gen- 
tleman in his train, that the hat and feather 
succeeded among us to the cap and jewels of 
Henry the Eighth. The ascendancy of Spain 
in those times carried it into other parts of 
Europe. The French, not requiring so much 
shade from the sun, and always playing with 
and altering their dress, as a child does his 
toy, first covered the brim with feathers, then 
gave them a pinch in front ; then came pinches 
up at the side ; and at last appeared the fierce 
and triple-daring cocked hat. This disappeared 
in our childhood, or only survived among the 
military, the old, and the reverend, who could 
not willingly part with their habitual dignity. 
An old beau or so would also retain it, in 
memory of its victories when young. We 
remember its going away from the heads of 
the foot-guards. The heavy dragoons retained 
it till lately. It is now almost sunk into the 
mock-heroic, and confined, as we before ob- 
served, to beadles and coachmen, &c. The 
modern clerical beaver, agreeably to the deli- 
beration with which our establishments depart 
from all custom, is a cocked hat with the front 
flap let down, and only a slight pinch remaining 
behind. This is worn also by the judges, the 
lawyers being of clerical extraction. Still 
however the true cocked-hat lingers here and 
there with a solitary old gentleman ; and 
wherever it appears in such company, begets 
a certain retrospective reverence. There was 
a something in its connexion with the high- 
bred drawing-room times of the seventeenth 
century ; in the gallant though quaint ardour 
of its look ; and in its being lifted up in salu- 
tations with that deliberate loftiness, the arm 
arching up in front and the hand slowly raising 
it by the front angle with finger and thumb, — 
that could not easily die. We remember, 
when our steward at school, remarkable for 
his inflexible air of precision and dignity, 
left off his cocked-hat for a round one ; there 



SEAMEN ON SHORE. 



59 



was, undoubtedly, though we dared only half 
confess it to our minds, a sort of diminished 
majesty about him. His infinite self-possession 
began to look remotely finite. His Crown 
Imperial was a little blighted. It was like 
divesting a column of its capital. But the 
native stateliness was there, informing the 
new hat. He 

Had not yet lost 
All his original beaver ; nor appeared 
Less than arch-steward ruined, and the excess 
Of glory obscured. 

The late Emperor Paul had conceived such 
a sense of the dignity of the cocked hat, aggra- 
vated by its having been deposed by the round 
one of the French republicans, that he ordered 
all persons in his dominions never to dare be 
seen in public with round hats, upon pain of 
being knouted and sent to Siberia. 

Hats being the easiest part of the European 
dress to be taken off, are doffed among us out 
of reverence. The Orientals, on the same 
account, put off their slippers instead of tur- 
bans, which is the reason why the Jews still 
keep their heads covered during worship. The 
Spanish grandees have the privilege of wearing 
their hats in the royal presence, probably in 
commemoration of the free spirit in which the 
Cortes used to crown the sovereign ; telling 
him (we suppose in their corporate capacity) 
that they were better men than he, but chose 
him of their own free will for their master. 
The grandees only claim to be as good men, 
unless their families are older. There is a well- 
known story of a picture, in which the Virgin 
Mary is represented with a label coming out of 
her mouth, saying to a Spanish gentleman who 
has politely taken off his hat, "Cousin, be 
covered." But the most interesting anecdote 
connected with a hat belongs to the family of 
the De Courcys, Lord Kinsale. One of their 
ancestors, at an old period of our history, 
having overthrown a huge and insolent cham- 
pion, who had challenged the whole court, was 
desired by the king to ask him some favour. 
He requested that his descendants should have 
the privilege of keeping their heads covered in 
the royal presence, and they do so to this day. 
The new lord, we believe, always comes to court 
on purpose to vindicate his right. We have heard, 
that on the last occasion, probably after a long 
interval, some of the courtiers thought it might 
as well have been dispensed with ; which was 
a foolish as well as a jealous thing, for these 
exceptions only prove the royal rule. The 
Spanish grandees originally took their privi- 
lege instead of receiving it ; but when the 
spirit of it had gone, their covered heads were 
only so many intense recognitions of the king's 
dignity, which it was thought such a mighty 
thing to resemble. A Quaker's hat is a more 
formidable thing than a grandee's. 



XXIX.— SEAMEN ON SHORE. 

The sole business of a seaman on shore, who 
has to go to sea again, is to take as much 
pleasure as he can. The moment he sets his 
foot on dry ground, he turns his back on all 
salt beef and other salt-water restrictions. 
His long absence, and the impossibility of get- 
ting land pleasures at sea, put him upon a sort 
of desperate appetite. He lands, like a con- 
queror taking possession. He has been debarred 
so long, that he is resolved to have that matter 
out with the inhabitants. They must render 
an account to him of their treasures, their 
women, their victualling-stores, their enter- 
tain ments, their everything ; and in return he 
will behave like a gentleman, and scatter his 
gold. 

His first sensation on landing, is the strange 
firmness of the earth, which he goes treading 
in a sort of heavy light way, half waggoner and 
half dancing-master, his shoulders rolling, and 
his feet touching and going ; the same way, in 
short, in which he keeps himself prepared for all 
the chances of the vessel, when on deck. There 
is always this appearance of lightness of foot 
and heavy strength of upper works, in a sailor. 
And he feels it himself. He lets his jacket fly 
open, and his shoulders slouch, and his hair 
grow long, to be gathered into a heavy pigtail j 
but when full dressed, he prides himself on a 
certain gentility of toe, on a white stocking 
and a natty shoe, issuing lightly out of the flow- 
ing blue trowser. His arms are neutral, hang- 
ing and swinging in a curve aloof ; his hands 
half open, as if they had just been handling 
ropes, and had no object in life but to handle 
them again. He is proud of appearing in a new 
hat and slops, with a Belcher handkerchief flow- 
ing loosely round his neck, and the corner of 
another out of his pocket. Thus equipped, with 
pinchbeck buckles in his shoes (which he bought 
for gold), he puts some tobacco in his mouth, 
not as if he were going to use it directly, but as if 
he stuffed it in a pouch on one side, as a peli- 
can does fish, to employ it hereafter ; and so, 
with Bet Monson at his side, and perhaps a 
cane or whanghee twisted under his other arm, 
sallies forth to take possession of all Lubber- 
land. He buys everything that he comes 
athwart — nuts, gingerbread,apples, shoe-strings, 
beer, brandy, gin, buckles, knives, a watch 
(two, if he has money enough), gowns and 
handkerchiefs for Bet and his mother and sisters, 
dozens of " Superfine Best Men's Cotton Stock- 
ings," dozens of "Superfine Best "Women's 
Cotton Ditto," best good Check for Shirts 
(though he has too much already), infinite 
needles and thread (to sew his trowsers with 
some day), a footman's laced hat, Bear's Grease, 
to make his hair grow (by way of joke), several 
sticks, all sorts of Jew articles, a flute (which 
he can't .play, and never intends), a leg of 



KO 



THE INDICATOR. 



mutton, which he carries somewhere to roast, 
and for a piece of which the landlord of the 
Ship makes him pay twice what he gave for the 
whole ; in short, all that money can be spent 
upon, which is everything bat medicine gratis, 
and this he would insist on paying for. He 
wouldbuyall the painted parrots on an Italian's 
head, on purpose to break them, rather than 
not spend his money. He has fiddles and a 
dance at the Sliip, with oceans of flip and grog ; 
and gives the blind fiddler tobacco for sweet- 
meats, and half-a-crown for treading on his toe. 
He asks the landlady, with a sigh, after her 
daughter Nanse, who first fired his heart with 
her silk stockings ; and finding that she is 
married and in trouble, leaves five crowns for 
her, which the old lady appropriates as part 
payment for a shilling in advance. He goes to 
the Port playhouse with Bet Monson, and a 
great red handkerchief full of apples, ginger- 
bread nuts, and fresh beef ; calls out for the 
fiddlers and Rule Britannia; pelts Tom Sikes 
in the pit ; and compares Othello to the black 
shij^s cook in his white nightcap. "When he 
comes to London, he and some messmates take 
a hackney-coach, full of Bet Monsons and 
tobacco-pipes, and go through the streets 
smoking and lolling out of window. He has 
ever been cautious of venturing on horseback, 
and among his other sights in foreign parts, 
relates with unfeigned astonishment how he 
has seen the Turks ride : " Only," says he, 
guarding against the hearer's incredulity, " they 
have saddle-boxes to hold 'em in, fore and 
aft, and shovels like for stirrups." He will tell 
you how the Chinese drink, and the Negurs 
dance, and the monkeys pelt you with cocoa- 
nuts ; and how King Domy would have built 
him a mud hut and made him a peer of the 
realm, if he would have stopped with him, and 
taught him to make trowsers. He has a sister 
at a " School for Young Ladies," who blushes 
with a mixture of pleasure and shame at his 
appearance ; and whose confusion he completes 
by slipping fourpence into her hand, and say- 
ing out loud that he has " no more copper " 
about him. His mother and elder sisters at 
home doat on all he says and does ; telling him 
however, that he is a great sea fellow, and was 
always wild ever since he was a hop-o'-my- 
thumb, no higher than the window locker. He 
tells his mother that she would be a duchess 
in Paranaboo ; at which the good old portly 
dame laughs and looks proud. When his sisters 
complain of his romping, he says that they are 
only sorry it is not the baker. He frightens 
them with a mask made after the New Zealand 
fashion, and is forgiven for his learning. Their 
mantel-piece is filled by him with shells and 
shark's teeth ; and when he goes to sea again, 
there is no end of tears, and " God bless you's ! " 
and home-made gingerbread. 

His Officer on shore does much of all this, 
only, generally speaking, in a higher taste. 



The moment he lands, he buys quantities of 
jewellery and other valuables, for all the 
females of his acquaintance ; and is taken in 
for every article. He sends in a cart-load of 
fresh meat to the ship, though he is going to 
town next day ; and calling in at a chandler's 
for some candles, is persuaded to buy a dozen 
of green wax, with which he lights up the ship 
at evening ; regretting that the fine moonlight 
hinders the effect of the colour. A man, with 
a bundle beneath his arm, accosts him in 
an under-tone ; and, with a look in which 
respect for his knowledge is mixed with 
an avowed zeal for his own interest, asks if 
his Honour will just step under the gangway 
here, and inspect some real India shawls. The 
gallant Lieutenant says to himself, " This fel- 
low knows what's what, by his face ; " and so 
he proves it, by being taken in on the spot. 
When he brings the shawls home, he says to 
his sister with an air of triumph, " There, Poll, 
there's something for you ; only cost me twelve, 
and is worth twenty if it 's worth a dollar." 
She turns pale — " Twenty what, my dear 
George ? Why, you haven't given twelve dol- 
lars for it, I hope ? " " Not I, by the Lord." — 
"That's lucky ; because you see, my dear, 
George, that all together is not worth more 
than fourteen or fifteen shillings " " Fourteen 
or fifteen what ! Why its real India, en't it ? 
Why the fellow told me so ; or I'm sure I'd as 
soon " — (here he tries to hide his blushes with 
a bluster) — I'd as soon have given him twelve 
douses on the chaps as twelve guineas." — 
" Twelve guineas ! " exclaims the sister ; and 
then drawling forth, " Why — my — dear — 
George," is proceeding to show him what the 
articles would have cost at Condell's, when he 
interrupts her by requesting her to go and 
choose for herself a tea-table service. He then 
makes his escape to some messmates at a coffee- 
house, and drowns his recollection of the shawls 
in the best wine, and a discussion on the com- 
parative merits of the English and West-Indian 
beauties and tables. At the theatre afterwards, 
where he has never been before, he takes a 
lady at the back of one of the boxes for a 
woman of quality ; and when, after returning 
his long respectful gaze with a smile, she turns 
aside and puts her handkerchief to her mouth, 
he thinks it is in derision, till his friend unde- 
ceives him. He is introduced to the lady ; and 
ever afterwards, at first sight of a woman of 
quality (without any disparagement either to 
those charming personages), expects her to give 
him a smile. He thinks the other ladies much 
better creatures than they are taken for ; and 
for their parts, they tell him, that if all men 
were like himself, they would trust the sex 
again : — which, for aught we know, is the truth. 
He has, indeed, what he thinks a very liberal 
opinion of ladies in general ; judging them all, 
in a manner, with the eye of a seaman's ex- 
perience. Yet he will believe nevertheless in 



SEAMEN ON SHORE. 



61 



the * true-love " of any given damsel whom 
he seeks in the way of marriage, let him roam 
as much, or remain as long at a distance, as 
he may. It is not that he wants feeling ; but 
that he has read of it, time out of mind, in 
songs ; and he looks upon constancy as a sort 
of exploit, answering to those which he per- 
forms at sea. He is nice in his watches and 
linen. He makes you presents of cornelians, 
antique seals, cocoa-nuts set in silver, and other 
valuables. When he shakes hands with you, 
it is like being caught in a windlass. He would 
not swagger about the streets in his uniform, 
for the world. He is generally modest in com- 
pany, though liable to be irritated by what he 
thinks ungentlemanly behaviour. He is also 
liable to be rendered irritable by sickness ; 
partly because he has been used to command 
others, and to be served with all possible de- 
ference and alacrity ; and partly, because the 
idea of suffering pain, without any honour or 
profit to get by it, is unprofessional, and he is 
not accustomed to it. He treats talents unlike 
his own with great respect. He often per- 
ceives his own so little felt, that it teaches him 
this feeling for that of others. Besides, he 
admires the quantity of information which 
people can get, without travelling like himself; 
especially when he sees how interesting his own 
becomes, to them as well as to everybody else. 
"When he tells a story, particularly if full of 
wonders, he takes care to maintain his charac- 
ter for truth and simplicity, by qualifying it 
with all possible reservations, concessions, and 
anticipations of objection ; such as, " in case, 
at such times as, so to speak, as it were, at 
least, at any rate." He seldom uses sea-terms 
but when jocosely provoked by something con- 
trary to his habits of life ; as for instance, if 
he is always meeting you on horseback, he 
asks if you never mean to walk the deck again; 
or if he finds you studying day after day, he 
says you are always overhauling your log-book. 
He makes more new acquaintances, and forgets 
his old ones less, than any other man in the 
busy world ; for he is so compelled to make 
his home everywhere, remembers his native 
one as such a place of enjoyment, has all his 
friendly recollections so fixed upon his mind 
at sea, and has so much to tell and to hear 
when he returns, that change and separation 
lose with him the most heartless part of their 
nature. He also sees such a variety of cus- 
toms and manners, that he becomes charitable 
in his opinions altogether ; and charity, while 
it diffuses the affections, cannot let the old ones 
go. Half the secret of human intercourse is 
to make allowance for each other. 

When the Officer is superannuated or retires, 
he becomes, if intelligent and inquiring, one 
of the most agreeable old men in the world, 
equally welcome to the silent for his card- 
playingj and to the conversational for his re- 
collections. He is fond of astronomy and 



books of voyages, and is immortal with all 
who know him for having been round the world, 
or seen the transit of Venus, or had one of his 
fingers carried off by a New Zealand hatchet, 
or a present of feathers from an Otaheitan 
beauty. If not elevated by his acquirements 
above some of his humbler tastes, he delights 
in a corner-cupboard holding his cocoa-nuts 
and punch-bowl ; has his summer-house cas- 
tellated and planted with wooden cannon ; and 
sets up the figure of his old ship, the Britannia 
or the Lovely Nancy, for a statue in the gar- 
den ; where it stares eternally with red cheeks 
and round black eyes, as if in astonishment 
at its situation. 

Chaucer, who wrote his Canterbury Tales 
about four hundred and thirty years ago, has 
among his other characters in that work a 
Ship man, who is exactly of the same cast as 
the modern sailor, — the same robustness, 
courage, and rough-drawn virtue, doing its 
duty, without being very nice in helping itself 
to its recreations. There is the very dirk, the 
complexion, the jollity, the experience, and the 
bad horsemanship. The plain unaffected end- 
ing of the description has the air of a sailor's 
own speech ; while the line about the beard is 
exceedingly picturesque, poetical, and compre- 
hensive. In copying it out, we shall merely 
alter the old spelling, where the words are 
still modern. 

A shipman was there, wonned far by west ; 
For aught I wot, he was of Dartemouth. 
He rode opon a rouncie, as he couth *, 
All in a gown of falding to the knee. 
A dagger hanging by a lace had he, 
About his neck, under his arm adown : 
The hot summer had made his hew all brown : 
And certainly he was a good felaw. 
Full many a draught of wine he hadde draw 
From Bourdeaux ward, while that the chapman slep. 
Of nice conscience took he no keep. 
If that he fought and had the higher hand, 
By water he sent 'em home to every land. 
But of his craft, to reckon well his tides, 
His streames and his strandes him besides, 
His harborough, his moon, and his lode manage, 
There was not such from Hull unto Carthage. 
Hardy he was, and wise, I undertake ; 
With many a tempest had his beard been shake. 
He knew well all the havens, as they were, 
From Gothland to the Cape de Finisterre, 
And every creek in Briton and in Spain. 
His barge ycleped was the Magdelain. 

When about to tell his Tale, he tells his fellow- 
travellers that he shall clink them so merry a 
bell, 

That it shall waken all this company : 
But it shall not be of philosophy, 
Nor of physick, nor of terms quaint of law ; 
There is but little Latin in my maw. 

The story he tells is a well-known one in the 
Italian novels, of a monk who made love to a 
merchant's wife, and borrowed a hundred 
francs of the husband to give her. She accord- 

* He rode upon a hack-horse, as well as he could. 



THE INDICATOR. 



ingly admits his addresses during the absence 
of her good man on a journey. When the 
latter returns, he applies to the cunning monk 
for repayment, and is referred to the lady ; 
who thus finds her mercenary behaviour out- 
witted. 



XXX.— ON THE REALITIES OF IMAGI- 
NATION. 

There is not a more unthinking way of 
talking, than to say such and such pains and 
pleasures are only imaginary, and therefore to 
be got rid of or undervalued accordingly. 
There is nothing imaginary, in the common 
acceptation of the word. The logic of Moses 
in the Vicar of Wakefield is good argument 
here : — " Whatever is, is." Whatever touches 
us, whatever moves us, does touch and does 
move us. We recognise the reality of it, as 
we do that of a hand in the dark. We might 
as well say that a sight which makes us laugh, 
or a blow which brings tears into our eyes, is 
imaginary, as that anything else is imaginary 
which makes us laugh or weep. We can only 
judge of things by their effects. Our percep- 
tion constantly deceives us, in things with 
which we suppose ourselves perfectly conver- 
sant ; but our reception of their effect is a 
different matter. Whether we are material- 
ists or immaterialists, whether things be about 
us or within us, whether we think the sun is 
a substance, or only the image of a divine 
thought, an idea, a thing imaginary, we are 
equally agreed as to the notion of its warmth. 
But on the other hand, as this warmth is felt 
differently by different temperaments, so what 
we call imaginary things affect different minds. 
What we have to do is not to deny their effect, 
because we do not feel in the same proportion, 
or whether we even feel it at all ; but to see 
whether our neighbours may not be moved. 
If they are, there is, to all intents and purposes, 
a moving cause. But we do not see it ? No ; 
— neither perhaps do they. They only feel it ; 
they are only sentient, — a word which implies 
the sight given to the imagination by the feel- 
ings. But what do you mean, we may ask in 
return, by seeing? Some rays of light come 
in contact with the eye ; they bring a sensa- 
tion to it ; in a word, they touch it ; and the 
impression left by this touch we call sight. 
How far does this differ in effect from the 
impression left by any other touch, however 
mysterious ? An ox knocked down by a 
butcher, and a man knocked down by a fit of 
apoplexy, equally feel themselves compelled to 
drop. The tickling of a straw and of a comedy, 
equally move the muscles about the mouth. 
The look of a beloved eye will so thrill the 
frame, that old philosophers have had recourse 
to a doctrine of beams and radiant particles 
flying from one sight to another. In fine, what 



is contact itself, and why does it affect us ? 
There is no one cause more mysterious than 
another, if we look into it. 

Nor does the question concern us like moral 
causes. We may be content to know the earth 
by its fruits ; but how to increase and improve 
them is a more attractive study. If instead of 
saying that the causes which moved in us this 
or that pain or pleasure were imaginary, people 
were to say that the causes themselves were 
removeable, they would be nearer the truth. 
When a stone trips us up, we do not fall to 
disputing its existence : we put it out of the 
way. In like manner, when we suffer from 
what is called an imaginary pain, our business 
is not to canvass the reality of it. Whether 
there is any cause or not in that or any other 
perception, or whether everything consist not 
in what is called effect, it is sufficient for us 
that the effect is real. Our sole business is to 
remove those second causes, which always 
accompany the original idea. As in deliriums, 
for instance, it would be idle to go about per- 
suading the patient that he did not behold the 
figures he says he does. He might reasonably 
ask us, if he could, how we know anything 
about the matter ; or how we can be sure, that 
in the infinite wonders of the universe, certain 
realities may not become apparent to certain 
eyes, whether diseased or not. Our business 
would be to put him into that state of health, 
in which human beings are not diverted from 
their offices and comforts by a liability to such 
imaginations. The best reply to his question 
would be, that such a morbidity is clearly no 
more a fit state for a human being, than a 
disarranged or incomplete state of works is for 
a watch ; and that seeing the general tendency 
of nature to this completeness or state of com- 
fort, we naturally conclude, that the imagi- 
nations in question, whether substantial or 
not, are at least not of the same lasting or 
prevailing description. 

We do not profess metaphysics. We are 
indeed so little conversant with the masters of 
that art, that we are never sure whether we are 
using even its proper terms. All that we may 
know on the subject comes to us from some 
reflection and some experience ; and this all 
may be so little as to make a metaphysician 
smile ; which, if he be a true one, he will do 
good-naturedly. The pretender will take oc- 
casion, from our very confession, to say that 
we know nothing. Our faculty, such as it is, 
is rather instinctive than reasoning ; rather 
physical than metaphysical; rather sentient 
because it loves much, than because it knows 
much ; rather calculated by a certain retention 
of boyhood, and by its wanderings in the green 
places of thought, to light upon a piece of the 
old golden world, than to tire ourselves, and 
conclude it unattainable, by too wide and 
scientific a search. We pretend to see farther 
than none but the worldly and the malignant. 



THE REALITIES OF IMAGINATION. 



63 



And yet those who see farther, may not all see 
so well. We do not blind our eyes with look- 
ing upon the sun in the heavens. We believe 
it to be there, but we find its light upon earth 
also ; and we would lead humanity, if we could, 
out of misery and coldness into the shine of 
it. Pain might still be there ; must be so, as 
long as we are mortal ; 

For oft we still must weep, since we are human : 

but it should be pain for the sake of others, 
which is noble ; not unnecessary pain inflicted 
by or upon them, which it is absurd not to 
remove. The very pains of mankind struggle 
towards pleasures ; and such pains as are 
proper for them have this inevitable accom- 
paniment of true humanity, — that they cannot 
but realise a certain gentleness of enjoyment. 
Thus the true bearer of pain would come round 
to us ; and he would not grudge us a share of 
his burden, though in taking from his trouble 
it might diminish his pride. Pride is but a 
bad pleasure at the expense of others. The 
great object of humanity is to enrich every- 
body. If it is a task destined not to succeed, 
it is a good one from its very nature ; and 
fulfils at least a glad destiny of its own. To 
look upon it austerely is in reality the reverse 
of austerity. It is only such an impatience of 
the want of pleasure as leads us to grudge it 
in others ; and this impatience itself, if the 
sufferer knew how to use it, is but another 
impulse, in the general yearning, towards an 
equal wealth of enjoyment. 

But we shall be getting into other discussions. 
— The ground- work of all happiness is health. 
Take care of this ground ; and the doleful 
imaginations that come to warn us against its 
abuse, will avoid it. Take care of this ground, 
and let as many glad imaginations throng to it 
as possible. Read the magical works of the 
poets, and they will come. If you doubt their 
existence, ask yourself whether you feel plea- 
sure at the idea of them ; whether you are 
moved into delicious smiles, or tears as delicious. 
If you are, the result is the same to you, 
whether they exist or not. It is not mere 
words to say, that he who goes through a rich 
man's park, and sees things in it which never 
bless the mental eyesight of the possessor, is 
richer than he. He is richer. More results 
of pleasure come home to him. The ground is 
actually more fertile to him : the place haunted 
with finer shapes. He has more servants to 
come at his call, and administer to him with 
full hands. Knowledge, sympathy, imagina- 
tion, are all divining-rods, with which he dis- 
covers treasure. Let a painter go through the 
grounds, and he will see not only the general 
colours of green and brown, but their com- 
binations and contrasts, and the modes in 
which they might again be combined and con- 
trasted. t He will also put figures in the land- 
scape if there are none there, flocks and herds, 



or a solitary spectator, or Venus lying with 
her white body among the violets and primroses. 
Let a musician go through, and he will hear 
" differences discreet " in the notes of the birds 
and the lapsing of the water-fall. He will 
fancy a serenade of wind instruments in the 
open air at a lady's window, with a voice rising 
through it ; or the horn of the hunter ; or the 
musical cry of the hounds, 

Matched in mouth like bells, 
Each under each ; 

or a solitary voice in a bower, singing for an 
expected lover ; or the chapel organ, waking 
up like the fountain of the winds. Let a poet 
go through the grounds, and he will heighten 
and increase all these sounds and images. He 
will bring the colours from heaven, and put an 
unearthly meaning into the voice. He will 
have stories of the sylvan inhabitants ; will 
shift the population through infinite varieties ; 
will put a sentiment upon every sight and 
sound ; will be human, romantic, supernatural ; 
will make all nature send tribute into that 
spot. 

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures 
While the landskip round it measures ; 
Russet lawns, and fallows grey, 
Where the nibbling flocks do stray ; 
Mountains, on whose barren breast 
The labouring clouds do often rest ; 
Meadows trim with daisies pied, 
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide. 
Towers and battlements it sees, 
Bosomed high in tufted trees, 
Where perhaps some Beauty lies, 
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes. 

But not to go on quoting lines which are ever 
in people's mouths like a popular tune, take a 
passage from the same poet less familiar to 
one's every-day recollections. It is in his Ar- 
cadian Masque, which was performed by some 
of the Derby family at their seat at Harefield 
near Uxbridge. The Genius of the place, 
meeting the noble shepherds and shepherdesses, 
accosts them : — 

Stay, gentle swains, for though in this disguise, 

I see bright honour sparkle through your eyes ; 

Of famous Arcady ye are, and sprung 

Of that renowned flood, so often sung, 

Divine Alpheus, who by secret sluice 

Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse ; 

And ye, the breathing roses of the wood, 

Fair silver-buskin'd Nymphs, as great and good ; 

I know this quest of yours, and free intent, 

Was all in honour and devotion meant 

To the great mistress of yon princely shrine, 

Whom with low reverence I adore as mine ; 

And with all helpful service will comply 

To further this night's glad solemnity ; 

And lead ye where ye may more near behold 

What shallow-searching Fame hath left untold ; 

Which I, full oft, amidst these shades alone, 

Have sat to wonder at, and gaze upon : 

For know, by lot from Jove I am the Power 

Of this fair wood, and live in oaken bower, 

To nurse the saplings tall, and curl the grove 

In ringlets quaint and wanton windings wove : 



64 



THE INDICATOR. 



And all my plants I save from nightly ill 

Of noisome winds, and blasting vapours chill ; 

And from the boughs brush off the evil dew, 

And heal the arms of thwarting thunder blue, 

Or what the cross dire-looking planet smites, 

Or hurtful worm with canker 'd venom bites. 

When evening grey doth rise, I fetch my round 

Over the mount, and all this hallow'd ground ; 

And early, ere the odorous breath of morn 

Awakes the slumbering leaves, or tassel'd horn 

Shakes the high thicket, haste I all about, 

Number my ranks, and visit every sprout 

With puissant words and murmurs made to bless. 

But else, in deep of night, when drowsiness 

Hath locked up mortal sense, then listen I 

To the celestial Syrens' harmony. 

That sit upon the nine infolded spheres, 

And sing to those that hold the vital shears, 

And turn the adamantine spindle round, 

On which the fate of gods and men is wound. 

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, 

To lull the daughters of Necessity, 

And keep unsteady Nature to her law, 

And the low world in measured motion draw. 

After the heavenly tune, which none can hear 

Of human mould, with gross unpurged ear. 

" Milton's Genius of the Grove," says War- 
ton, " being a spirit sent from Jove, and com- 
missioned from heaven to exercise a preterna- 
tural guardianship over the ' saplings tall,' to 
avert every noxious influence, and 'to visit 
every sprout with puissant words, and mur- 
murs made to bless/ had the privilege, not 
indulged to gross mortals, of hearing the 
celestial syrens' harmony. This enjoyment," 
continues the critic, in the spirit of a true 
reader, luxuriating over a beautiful thought, 
"this enjoyment, which is highly imagined, 
was a relaxation from the duties of his peculiar 
charge, in the depth of midnight, when the 
world is locked up in sleep and silence."* 
The music of the spheres is the old Platonic or 
Pythagorean doctrine ; but it remained for 
Milton to render it a particular midnight re- 
creation to "purged ears," after the earthly 
toils of the day. And we partake of it with 
the Genius. We may say of the love of nature, 
what Shakspeare says of another love, that it 

Adds a precious seeing to the eye. 

And we may say also, upon the like principle, 
that it adds a precious hearing to the ear. This 
and imagination, which ever follows upon it, 
are the two purifiers of our sense, which rescue 
us from the deafening babble of common cares, 
and enable us to hear all the affectionate 
voices of earth and heaven. The starry orbs, 
lapsing about in their smooth and sparkling 
dance, sing to us. The brooks talk to us 
of solitude. The birds are the animal spirits 



* If the reader wishes to indulge himself in a volume 
full of sheer poetry with a pleasant companion, familiar 
with the finest haunts of the Muses, he cannot do better 
than get Warton's Edition of the Minor Poems of Milton. 
The principal notes have been transferred by Mr. Todd 
to the sixth volume of his own valuable edition of Milton's 
Poetical Works ,- but it is better to have a good thing 
entire. 



of nature, carolling in the air, like a careless 
lass. 

The gentle gales, 
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dippense 
Native perfumes ; and whisper whence they stole 
Those balmy spoils — Paradise Lost, book iv. 

The poets are called creators (Uoi-qral^ Makers) 
because with their magical words they bring 
forth to our eyesight the abundant images and 
beauties of creation. They put them there, if 
the reader pleases ; and so are literally creators. 
But whether put there or discovered, whether 
created or invented (for invention means 
nothing but finding out), there they are. If 
they touch us, they exist to as much purpose as 
anything else which touches us. If a passage 
in King Lear brings the tears into our eyes, it is 
real as the touch of a sorrowful hand. If the 
flow of a song of Anacreon's intoxicates us, it 
is as true to a pulse within us as the wine he 
drank. We hear not their sounds with ears, 
nor see their sights with eyes ; but we hear 
and see both so truly, that we are moved with 
pleasure ; and the advantage, nay even the 
test, of seeing and hearing, at any time, is not 
in the seeing and hearing, but in the ideas we 
realise, and the pleasure we derive. Intel- 
lectual objects, therefore, inasmuch as they 
come home to us, are as true a part of the stock 
of nature, as visible ones ; and they are infi- 
nitely more abundant. Between the tree of a 
country clown and the tree of a Milton or 
Spenser, what a difference in point of produc- 
tiveness ! Between the plodding of a sexton 
through a church-yard, and the walk of a Gray, 
what a difference ! What a difference between 
the Bermudas of a ship-builder and the Ber- 
moothes of Shakspeare ! the isle 

Full of noises, 
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not ; 

the isle of elves and fairies, that chased the 
tide to and fro on the sea-shore ; of coral-bones 
and the knell of sea-nymphs : of spirits dancing 
on the sands, and singing amidst the hushes of 
the wind ; of Caliban, whose brute nature en- 
chantment had made poetical; of Ariel, who lay 
in cowslip bells, and rode upon the bat ; of 
Miranda, who wept when she saw Ferdinand 
work so hard, and begged him to let her help ; 
telling him, 

I am your wife, if you will marry me ; 
If not, I'll die your maid. To be your fellow 
You may deny me ; but 111 be your servant, 
Whether you will or no. 

Such are the discoveries which the poets make 
for us ; worlds, to which that of Columbus was 
but a handful of brute matter. America began 
to be richer for us the other day, when Hum- 
boldt came back and told us of its luxuriant 
and gigantic vegetation ; of the myriads of 
shooting lights, which revel at evening in the 
southern sky ; and of that grand constellation, 
at which Dante seems to have made so remark- 



DEATHS OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 



able a guess (Purgatorio, cant, i., v. 22). The 
natural warmth of the Mexican and Peruvian 
genius, set free from despotism, will soon do 
all the rest for it ; awaken the sleeping riches 
of its eye-sight, and call forth the glad music of 
its affections. 

To return to our parks or landscapes, and 
what the poets can make of them. It is not 
improbable that Milton, by his Genius of the 
Grove at Harefield, covertly intended himself. 
He had been applied to by the Derbys to write 
some holiday poetry for them. He puts his 
consent in the mouth of the Genius, whose 
hand, he says, curls the ringlets of the grove, 
and who refreshes himself at midnight with 
listening to the music of the spheres ; that is 
to say, whose hand confers new beauty on it 
by its touch, and who has pleasures in solitude 
far richer and loftier than those of mere patri- 
cian mortal. 

See how finely Ben Jonson enlivens his 
description of Penshurst, the family-seat of the 
Sydneys ; now with the creations of classical 
mythology, and now with the rural manners of 
the time. 

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, 

Or touch, of marble ; nor canst boast a row 

Of polished pillows, or a roof of gold ; 

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told ; 

Or stairs, or courts ; but stand'st an ancient pile : 

And these, grudged at, are reverenced the while. 

Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air, 

Of wood, of water : therein thou art fair. 

Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport ; 

Thy mount, to which the Dryads do resort ; 

Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made, 

Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade ; 

That taller tree, which of a nut was set 

At his great birth, where all the Muses met*. 

There, in the writhed bark, are cut the names 

Of many a Sylvan, taken with his flames : 

And thence the ruddy Satyrs oft provoke 

The lighter fawns to reach thy lady's oak. 

Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there, 

That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer, 

When thou wouldst feast, or exercise thy friends. 

The lower land, that to the river bends, 

Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed ; 

The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed : 

Each bank doth yield thee conies ; and thy tops 

Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sydney copse, 

To crown,— thy open table doth provide 

The purple pheasant with the speckled side. 



Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, 

Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. 

The early cherry, with the later plum, 

Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come : 

The blushing apricot, and woolly peach, 

Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach ; 

And though thy walls be of the country stone, 

They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan ; 

There's none that dwell about them wish them down ; 

But all come in, the farmer and the clown, 

And no one empty-handed, to salute 

Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. 

Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, 

Some nuts, some apples ; some that think they make 



Sir Philip Sydney. 



The better cheeses, bring 'em ; or else send 
By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend 
This way to husbands ; and whose baskets bear 
An emblem of themselves in plum or pear. 

Imagination enriches everything. A great 
library contains not only books, but 

The assembled souls of all that men held wise. 

Bavenant. 

The moon is Homer's and Shakspeare's moon, 
as well as the one we look at. The sun comes 
out of his chamber in the east, with a sparkling 
eye, " rejoicing like a bridegroom." The com- 
monest thing becomes like Aaron's rod, that 
budded. Pope called up the spirits of the 
Cabala to wait upon a lock of hair, and justly 
gave it the honours of a constellation ; for he 
has hung it, sparkling for ever, in the eyes of 
posterity. A common meadow is a sorry thing 
to a ditcher or a coxcomb ; but by the help of 
its dues from imagination and the love of 
nature, the grass brightens for us, the air 
soothes us, we feel as we did in the daisied 
hours of childhood. Its verdures, its sheep, its 
hedge-row elms, — all these, and all else which 
sight, and sound, and associations can give it, 
are made to furnish a treasure of pleasant 
thoughts. Even brick and mortar are vivified, 
as of old, at the harp of Orpheus. A metropolis 
becomes no longer a mere collection of houses 
or of trades. It puts on all the grandeur of its 
history, and its literature ; its towers, and 
rivers ; its art, and jewellery, and foreign 
wealth ; its multitude of human beings all in- 
tent upon excitement, wise or yet to learn ; 
the huge and sullen dignity of its canopy of 
smoke by day ; the wide gleam upwards of its 
lighted lustre at night-time ; and the noise of 
its many chariots, heard at the same hour, 
when the wind sets gently towards some quiet 
suburb. 



XXXII.— DEATHS OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 

A Grecian philosopher being asked why he 
wept for the death of his son, since the sorrow 
was in vain, replied, " I weep on that account." 
And his answer became his wisdom. It is only 
for sophists to contend, that we, whose eyes 
contain the fountains of tears, need never give 
way to them. It would be unwise not to do so 
on some occasions. Sorrow unlocks them in 
her balmy moods. The first bursts may be 
bitter and overwhelming ; but the soil on 
which they pour, would be worse without 
them. They refresh the fever of the soul — 
the dry misery which parches the countenance 
into furrows, and renders us liable to our most 
terrible " flesh-quakes." 

There are sorrows, it is true, so great, that 
to give them some of the ordinary vents is to 
run a hazard of being overthrown. These we 
must rather strengthen ourselves to resist, or 



66 



THE INDICATOR. 



bow quietly and drily down, in order to let 
them pass over us, as the traveller does the 
wind of the desert. But where we feel that 
tears would relieve us, it is false philosophy to 
deny ourselves at least that first refreshment ; 
and it is always false consolation to tell people 
that because they cannot help a thing, they are 
not to mind it. The true way is, to let them 
grapple with the unavoidable sorrow, and try 
to win it into gentleness by a reasonable yield- 
ing. There are griefs so gentle in their very 
nature, that it would be worse than false hero- 
ism to refuse them a tear. Of this kind are 
the deaths of infants. Particular circum- 
stances may render it more or less advisable to 
| indulge in grief for the loss of a little child ; but, 
1 in general, parents should be no more advised 
to repress their first tears on such an occasion, 
than to repress their smiles towards a child 
surviving, or to indulge in any other sympathy. 
It is an appeal to the same gentle tenderness ; 
and such appeals are never made in vain. The 
end of them is an acquittal from the harsher 
bonds of affliction — from the tying down of the 
spirit to one melancholy idea. 

It is the nature of tears of this kind, how- 
ever strongly they may gush forth, to run into 
quiet waters at last. We cannot easily, for 
the whole course of our lives, think with pain 
of any good and kind person whom we have 
lost. It is the divine nature of their qualities 
to conquer pain and death itself ; to turn the 
memory of them into pleasure ; to survive with 
a placid aspect in our imaginations. We are 
writing at this moment just opposite a spot 
which contains the grave of one inexpressibly 
dear to us. We see from our window the trees 
about it, and the church spire. The green 
fields lie around. The clouds are travelling 
over-head, alternately taking away the sun- 
shine and restoring it. The vernal winds, 
piping of the flowery summer-time, are never- 
theless calling to mind the far-distant and 
dangerous ocean, which the heart that lies in 
that grave had many reasons to think of. And 
yet the sight of this spot does not give us pain. 
So far from it, it is the existence of that grave 
which doubles every charm of the spot ; which 
links the pleasures of our childhood and man- 
hood together ; which puts a hushing tender- 
ness in the winds, and a patient joy upon the 
landscape ; which seems to unite heaven and 
earth, mortality and immortality, the grass of 
the tomb and the grass of the green field ; and 
gives a more maternal aspect to the whole 
kindness of nature. It does not hinder gaiety 
itself. Happiness was what its tenant, through 
all her troubles, would have diffused. To 
diffuse happiness and to enjoy it, is not only 
carrying on her wishes, but realising her hopes ; 
and gaiety, freed from its only pollutions, malig- 
nity and want of sympathy, is but a child play- 
ing about the knees of its mother. 
The remembered innocence and endearments 



of a child stand us instead of virtues that have 
died older. Children have not exercised the 
voluntary offices of friendship ; they have not 
chosen to be kind and good to us ; nor stood 
by us, from conscious will, in the hour of 
adversity. But they have shared their plea- 
sures and pains with us as well as they could ; 
the interchange of good offices between us has, 
of necessity,beenless mingled with the troubles 
of the world ; the sorrow arising from their 
death is the only one which we can associate 
with their memories. These are happy thoughts 
that cannot die. Our loss may always render 
them pensive ; but they will not always be 
painful. It is a part of the benignity of Nature 
that pain does not survive like pleasure, at any 
time, much less where the cause of it is an in- 
nocent one. The smile will remain reflected 
by memory, as the moon reflects the light 
upon us when the sun has gone into heaven. 

When writers like ourselves quarrel with 
earthly pain (we mean writers of the same in- 
tentions, without implying, of course, anything 
about abilities or otherwise), they are mis- 
understood if they are supposed to quarrel 
with pains of every sort. This would be idle 
and effeminate. They do not pretend, indeed, 
that humanity might not wish, if it could, to 
be entirely free from pain ; for it endeavours, 
at all times, to turn pain into pleasure : or at 
least to set off the one with the other, to make 
the former a zest and the latter a refreshment. 
The most unaffected dignity of suffering does 
this,and,if wise, acknowledges it. The greatest 
benevolence towards others, the most unselfish 
relish of their pleasures, even at its own ex- 
pense, does but look to increasing the general 
stock of happiness, though content, if it could, 
to have its identity swallowed up in that 
splendid contemplation. We are far from 
meaning that this is to be called selfishness. 
We are far, indeed, from thinking so, or of so 
confounding words. But neither is it to be 
called pain when most unselfish, if disinterest- 
edness be truly understood. The pain that is 
in it softens into pleasure, as the darker hue of 
the rainbow melts into the brighter. Yet even 
if a harsher line is to be drawn between the 
pain and pleasure of the most unselfish mind 
(and ill-health, for instance, may draw it), we 
should not quarrel with it if it contributed to 
the general mass of comfort, and were of a 
nature which general kindliness could not avoid. 
Made as we are, there are certain pains with- 
out which it would be difficult to conceive 
certain great and overbalancing pleasures. 
We may conceive it possible for beings to be 
made entirely happy ; but in our composition 
something of pain seems to be a necessary in- 
gredient, in order that the materials may turn 
to as fine account as possible, though our clay, 
in the course of ages and experience, may be 
refined more and more. We may get rid of 
the worst earth, though not of earth itself. 



POETICAL ANOMALIES OF SHAPE. 



67 



Now the liability to the loss of children — 
or rather what renders us sensible of it, the 
occasional loss itself — seems to be one of these 
necessary bitters thrown into the cup of 
humanity. "We do not mean that every one 
must lose one of his children in order to enjoy 
the rest ; or that every individual loss afflicts 
us in the same proportion. We allude to the 
deaths of infants in general. These might be 
as few as we could render them. But if none 
at all ever took place, we should regard every 
little child as a man or woman secured ; and 
it will easily be conceived what a world of 
endearing cares and hopes this security would 
endanger. The very idea of infancy would 
lose its continuity with us. Girls and boys 
would be future men and women, not present 
children. They would have attained their full 
growth in our imaginations, and might as well 
have been men and women at once. On the 
other hand, those who have lost an infant, are 
never, as it were, without an infant child. 
They are the only persons who, in one sense, 
retain it always, and they furnish their neigh- 
bours with the same idea*. The other children 
grow up to manhood and womanhood, and 
suffer all the changes of mortality. This one 
alone is rendered an immortal child. Death 
has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and 
blessed it into an eternal image of youth and 
innocence. 

Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes 
that visit our fancy and our hopes. They are 
the ever-smiling emblems of joy ; the prettiest 
pages that wait upon imagination. Lastly, 
" Of these are the kingdom of heaven ." Where- 
ever there is a province of that benevolent and 
all-accessible empire, whether on earth or else- 
where, such are the gentle spirits that must 
inhabit it. To such simplicity, or the resem- 
blance of it, must they come. Such must be 
the ready confidence of their hearts, and 
creativeness of their fancy. And so ignorant 
must they be of the " knowledge of good and 
eviL" losing their discernment of that self- 
created trouble, by enjoying the garden before 
them, and not being ashamed of what is kind! 
and innocent. 



XXXIII.—POETICAL ANOMALIES OF 
SHAPE. 

It is not one of the least instances of the 
force of habit to see how poetry and mythology 
can reconcile us to shapes, or rather combi- 
nations of shape, unlike anything in nature. 
The dog-headed deities of the Egyptians were 
doubtless not so monstrous in their eyes as in 



* " I sighed," says old Captain Dal ton, " when I envied 
you the two bonnie children ; but I sigh not now to call 
either the monk or the soldier mine own ["—Monastery, 
vol. iii., p. 341. 



ours. The Centaurs of the Greeks, as Ovid 
has shown us, could be imagined possessing 
beauty enough for a human love story ; and 
our imaginations find nothing at all monstrous 
in the idea of an angel, though it partakes of 
the nature of the bird. The angel, it is true, 
is the least departure from humanity. Its 
wings are not an alteration of the human 
shape, but an addition to it. Yet, leaving a 
more awful wonder out of the question, we 
should be startled to find pinions growing out 
of the shoulder-blades of a child ; and we 
should wait with anxiety to see of what nature 
the pinions were, till we became reconciled to 
them. If they turned out to be ribbed and 
webbed, like those of the imaginary dragon, 
conceive the horror ! If, on the other hand, 
they became feathers, and tapered off, like 
those of a gigantic bird, comprising also grace 
and splendour, as well as the power of flight, 
we can easily fancy ourselves reconciled to 
them. And yet again, on the other hand, the 
flying women, described in the Adventures of 
Peter Wilkins, do not shock us, though their 
wings partake of the ribbed and webbed nature, 
and not at all of the feathered. We admire 
Peter's gentle and beautiful bride, notwith- 
standing the phenomenon of the graundee, its 
light whalebone-like intersections, and its 
power of dropping about her like drapery. It 
even becomes a matter of pleasant curiosity. 
We find it not at all in the way. We can 
readily apprehend the delight he felt at possess- 
ing a creature so kind and sensitive ; and can 
sympathise with him in the happiness of that 
bridal evening, equally removed from prudery 
and grossness, which he describes with a mix- 
ture of sentiment and voluptuousness beyond 
all the bridals we ever read. 

To imagine anything like a sympathy of this 
kind, it is of course necessary that the differ- 
ence of form should consist in addition, and not 
in alteration. But the un-angel-like texture 
of the flying apparatus of fair Youwarkee 
(such, if we remember, is her name) helps to 
show us the main reason why we are able to 
receive pleasure from the histories of creatures 
only half-human. The habit of reading pre- 
vents the first shock ; but we are reconciled in 
proportion to their possession of what we are 
pleased to call human qualities. Kindness is 
the great elevator. The Centaurs may have 
killed all the Lapithse, and shown considerable 
generalship to boot, without reconciling us to 
the brute part of them ; but the brutality melts j 
away before the story of their two lovers in J 
Ovid. Drunkenness and rapine made beasts 
of them; — sentiment makes human beings. 
Polyphemus in Homer is a shocking monster, 
not because he has only one eye, but because 
he murders and eats our fellow-creatures. But 
in Theocritus, where he is Galatea's lover, and 
sits hopelessly lamenting his passion, we only 
pity him. . His deformity even increases our 
F 2 



08 



THE INDICATOR. 



pity. We blink the question of beauty, and 
become one-eyed for his sake. Nature seems 
to do him an injustice in gifting him with 
sympathies so human, and at the same time 
preventing them from being answered ; and 
we feel impatient with the all-beautiful Galatea, 
if we think she ever showed him scorn as well 
as unwillingness. We insist upon her avoiding 
him with the greatest possible respect. 

These fictions of the poets, therefore, besides 
the mere excitement which they give the imagi- 
nation, assist remotely to break the averseness 
and uncharitableness of human pride. And 
they may blunt the point of some fancies that 
are apt to come upon melancholy minds. 
When Sir Thomas Brown, in the infinite range 
of his metaphysical optics, turned his glass, as 
he no doubt often did, towards the inhabitants 
of other worlds, the stories of angels and Cen- 
taurs would help his imaginative good-nature 
to a more willing conception of creatures in 
other planets unlike those on earth ; to other 
"lords of creation;" and other, and perhaps 
nobler humanities, noble in spirit, though differ- 
ing in form. If indeed there can be anything 
in the starry endlessness of existence, nobler 
than what we can conceive of love and gene- 
rosity. 



XXXIV.— SPRING AND DAISIES. 

Spring, while we are writing, is complete. 
The winds have done their work. The shaken 
air, well tempered and equalised, has subsided ; 
the genial rains, however thickly they may 
come, do not saturate the ground, beyond the 
power of the sun to dry it up again. There 
are clear crystal mornings ; noons of blue sky 
and white cloud ; nights, in which the growing 
moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a 
young shepherdess at her flock. A few days 
ago she lay gazing in this manner at the soli- 
tary evening star, like Diana, on the slope of a 
valley, looking up at Endymion. His young 
eye seemed to sparkle out upon the world ; 
while she, bending inwards, her hands behind 
her head, watched him with an enamoured 
dumbness. 

But this is the quiet of Spring. Its voices 
and swift movements have come back also. 
The swallow shoots by us, like an embodied 
ardour of the season. The glowing bee has his 
will of the honied flowers, grappling with them 
as they tremble. We have not yet heard the 
nightingale or the cuckoo ; but we can hear 
them with our imagination, and enjoy them 
through the content of those who have. 

Then the young green. This is the most apt 
and perfect mark of the season, — the true issu- 
ing forth of the Spring. The trees and bushes 
are putting forth their crisp fans ; the lilac is 
loaded with bud ; the meadows are thick with 



the bright young grass, running into sweeps of 
white and gold with the daisies and butter- 
cups. The orchards announce their riches, in 
a shower of silver blossoms. The earth in 
fertile woods is spread with yellow and blue 
carpets of primroses, violets, and hyacinths, 
over which the birch-trees, like stooping 
nymphs, hang with their thickening hair. 
Lilies-of-the-valley, stocks, columbines, lady- 
smocks, and the intensely red piony which 
seems to anticipate the full glow of summer- 
time, all come out to wait upon the season, like 
fairies from their subterraneous palaces. 

Who is to wonder that the idea of love 
mingles itself with that of this cheerful and 
kind time of the year, setting aside even 
common associations ? It is not only its youth, 
and beauty, and budding life, and " the passion 
of the groves," that exclaim with the poet, 

Let those love now, who never loved before ; 
And those who always loved, now love the more *. 

All our kindly impulses are apt to have more 
sentiment in them, than the world suspect; 
and it is by fetching out this sentiment, and 
making it the ruling association, that we exalt 
the impulse into generosity and refinement, 
instead of degrading it, as is too much the case, 
into what is selfish, and coarse, and pollutes all 
our systems. One of the greatest inspirers of 
love is gratitude, — not merely on its common 
grounds, but gratitude for pleasures, whether 
consciously or unconsciously conferred. Thus 
we are thankful for the delight given us by a 
kind and sincere face ; and if we fall in love 
with it, one great reason is, that we long to 
return what we have received. The same 
feeling has a considerable influence in the love 
that has been felt for men of talents, whose 
persons or address have not been much calcu- 
lated to inspire it. In spring-time, joy awakens 
the heart : with joy, awakes gratitude and 
nature ; and in our gratitude, we return, on its 
own principle of participation, the love that 
has been shown us. 

This association of ideas renders solitude in 
spring, and solitude in winter, two very differ- 
ent things. In the latter, we are better content 
to bear the feelings of the season by ourselves : 
in the former they are so sweet as well as so 
overflowing, that we long to share them. 
Shakspeare, in one of his sonnets, describes 
himself as so identifying the beauties of the 
Spring with the thought of his absent mistress, 
that he says he forgot them in their own 
character, and played with them only as with 
her shadow. See how exquisitely he turns a 
common-place into this fancy ; and what a noble 
brief portrait of April he gives us at the begin- 
ning. There is indeed a wonderful mixture of 
softness and strength in almost every one of 
the lines. 

* Pervigilium Veneris.— Parnell's translation. 



SPRING AND DAISIES. 



6G 



From you have I been absent in the spring, 

"When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing ; 

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. 

Yet not the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell 

Of different flowers in odour and in hue, 

Could make me any summer's story tell, 

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew : 

Nor did I wonder at the lilies white, 

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose : 

They were but sweet, but patterns of delight, 

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. 

Yet seemed it winter still ; and, you away, 

As with your shadow, I with these did play. 

Shakspeare was fond of alluding to April. He 
did not allow May to have all his regard, be- 
cause she was richer. Perdita, crowned with 
flowers, in the Winter's Tale, is beautifully- 
compared to 

Flora, 
Peering in April's front. 

There is a line in one of his sonnets, which, 
agreeably to the image he had in his mind, 
seems to strike up in one's face, hot and odorous, 
like perfume in a censer. 

In process of the seasons have I seen 

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned. 

His allusions to Spring are numerous in pro- 
portion. We all know the song, containing 
that fine line, fresh from the most brilliant of 
pallets : — 

When daisies pied, and violets blue, 
And lady-smocks all silver white, 
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, 
Do paint the meadows with delight. 

We owe a long debt of gratitude to the 
daisy; and we take this opportunity of dis- 
charging a millionth part of it. If we undertook 
to pay it all, we should have had to write such 
a book, as is never very likely to be written, — 
a journal of numberless happy hours in child- 
hood, kept with the feelings of an infant and 
the pen of a man. For it would take, we 
suspect, a depth of delight and a subtlety of 
words, to express even the vague joy of infancy, 
such as our learned departures from natural 
wisdom would find it more difiicult to put 
together, than criticism and comfort, or an old 
palate and a young relish. — But knowledge is 
the widening and the brightening road that 
must conduct us back to the joys from which 
it led us ; and which it is destined perhaps to 
secure and extend. We must not quarrel with 
its asperities, when we can help. 

We do not know the Greek name of the 
daisy, nor do the dictionaries inform us ; and 
we are not at present in the way of consulting 
books that might. We always like to see what 
the Greeks say to these things, because they 
had a sentiment in their enjoyments. The 
Latins called the daisy Bellis or Bellus, as 
much as to say Nice One. With the French 
and Italians it has the same name as a Pearl, 
— Marguerite, Margarita, or, by way of endear- 



ment, Margheretina*. The same word was 
the name of a woman, and occasioned infinite 
intermixtures of compliment about pearls, 
daisies, and fair mistresses. Chaucer, in his 
beautiful poem of the Flower and the Leaf, which 
is evidently imitated from some French poetess, 
says, 

And at the laste there began anon 

A lady for to sing right womanly 

A bargaretf in praising the daisie, 

For as me thought among her notes sweet, 

She said " Si douset est la Margarete." 

" The Margaret is so sweet." Our Margaret, 
however, in this allegorical poem, is under- 
valued in comparison with the laurel ; yet 
Chaucer perhaps was partly induced to trans- 
late it on account of its making the figure that 
it does ; for he has informed us more than 
once, in a very particular manner, that it was 
his favourite flower. There is an interesting 
passage to this effect in his Legend of Good 
Women ; where he says, that nothing but the 
daisied fields in spring could take him from 
his books. 

And as for me, though that I can % but lite? 

On bookes for to read I me delight, 

And to hem give I faith and full credence, 

And in my heart have hem in reverence, 

So heartily, that there is game none, 

That from my bookes maketh me to gone, 

But it be seldom, on the holy day ; 

Save certainly, when that the month of May 

Is comen, and that I hear the foules sing, 

And that the flowers ginnen for to spring, 

Farewell my booke, and my devotion. 

Now have I then eke this condition, 

That, of all the flowers in the mead, 

Then love I most those flowers white and red, 

Such that men callen daisies in our town. 

To hem I have so great affection, 

As I said erst, when comen is the May, 

That in the bed there daweth § me no day, 

That I nam up and walking in the mead, 

To seen this flower agenst the sunne spread, 

When it upriseth early by the morrow, 

That blissful sight sof teneth all my sorrow. 

So glad am I, when that I have presence 

Of it, to done it all reverence, 

As she that is of all flowers the flower. 

He says that he finds it ever new, and that he 
shall love it till his " heart dies :" and after- 
wards, with a natural picture of his resting on 
the grass, 

Adown full softeley I gan to sink, 
And leaning on my elbow and my side, 
The long day I shope || me for to abide 
For nothing else, and I shall not lie, 
But for to look upon the daisie ; 
That well by reason men it call may 
The daisia, or else the eye of day. 

This etymology, which we have no doubt is 
the real one, is repeated by Ben Jonson, who 

* This word is originally Greek,— Margarites ; and as 
the Franks probably brought it from Constantinople, per- 
haps they brought its association with the daisy also. 

t Bargaret, Bergerette, a little pastoral. 

X Know but little. § Dawneth. || Shaped. 



70 



THE INDICATOR. 



takes occasion to spell the word " days-eyes ;" 
adding, with his usual tendency to overdo a 
matter of learning, 

Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows ; 

videlicet, cowslips : which is a disentanglement 
of compounds, in the style of our pleasant 
parodists : 

• Puddings of the plum, 

And fingers of the lady. 

Mr. Wordsworth introduces his homage to the 
daisy with a passage from George Wither ; 
which, as it is an old favourite of ours, and 
extremely applicable both to this article and 
our whole work, we cannot deny ourselves the 
pleasure of repeating. It is the more interest- 
ing, inasmuch as it was written in prison, 
where the freedom of the author's opinions had 
thrown him*. He is speaking of his Muse, or 
Imagination. 

Her divine skill taught me this ; 
That from every thing I saw 
I could some instruction draw, 
And raise pleasure to the height 
From the meanest object's sight. 
By the murmur of a spring, 
Or the least bough's rustelling ; 
By a daisy, whose leaves spread 
Shut, when Titan goes to bed ; 
Or a shady bush or tree ; 
She could more infuse in me, 
Than all Nature's beauties can 
In some other wiser man. 

Mr. Wordsworth undertakes to patronise the 
Celandine, because nobody else will notice it ; 
which is a good reason. But though he tells 
us, in a startling piece of information, that 

Poets, vain men in their mood, 
Travel with the multitude, 

yet he falls in with his old brethren of England 
and Normandy, and becomes loyal to the daisy. 

Be violets in their secret mews 

The flowers the wanton Zephyrs chuse ; 

Proud be the rose, with rains and dews 

Her head impearling ; 
Thou liv'st with less ambitious aim, 
Yet hast not gone without thy fame ; 
Thou art indeed, by many a claim, 

The poet's darling. 
***** 

A nun demure, of lowly port ; 

Or sprightly maiden of Love's court, 

In thy simplicity the sport 

Of all temptations ; 
A queen in crown of rubies drest ; 
A starveling in a scanty vest ; 
Are all, as seem to suit thee best, 

Thy appellations. 

A little Cyclops, with one eye 
Staring to threaten or defy, — 
That thought comes next, and instantly 

* It is not generally known, that Chaucer was four 
years in prison, in his old age, on the same account. He 
was a Wickliflfite,— one of the precursors of the Reforma- 
tion. His prison, doubtless, was no diminisher of his love 
of the daisy. 



The freak is over ; 
The freak will vanish, and behold ! 
A silver shield with boss of gold, 
That spreads itself, some fairy bold 

In fight to cover. 

I see thee glittering from afar ; 
And then thou art a pretty star, 
Not quite so fair as many are 

In heaven above thee ! 
Yet like a star, with glittering crest, 
Self-poised in air, thou seem'st to rest ; — 
May peace come never to his nest, 

Who shall reprove thee. 

Sweet flower ! for by that name at last, 
When all my reveries are past, 
I call thee, and to that cleave fast ; 

Sweet silent creature ! 
That breath 'st with me in sun and air, 
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair 
My heart with gladness, and a share 

Of thy meek nature. 

Mr. Wordsworth calls the daisy " an unas- 
suming common-place of Nature," which it is ; 
and he praises it very becomingly for dis- 
charging its duties so cheerfully, in that uni- 
versal character. But we cannot agree with 
him in thinking that it has a " homely face." 
Not that we should care, if it had ; for home- 
liness does not make ugliness ; but we appeal 
to everybody, whether it is proper to say this 
of la belle Marguerite. In the first place, its 
shape is very pretty and slender, but not too 
much so. Then it has a boss of gold, set round 
and irradiated with silver points. Its yellow 
and fair white are in so high a taste of contrast, 
that Spenser has chosen the same colours for 
a picture of Leda reposing : 

Oh wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man ! 

That her in daffodillies sleeping laid, 

From scorching heat her dainty limbs to shade. 

It is for the same reason, that the daisy, 
being chiefly white, makes such a beautiful 
show in company with the buttercup. But 
this is not all ; for look at the back, and you 
find its fair petals blushing with a most delight- 
ful red. And how compactly and delicately is 
the neck set in green ! Belle et douce Marguerite, 
aimable sosur du roi Kingcup, we would tilt 
for thee with a hundred pens, against the 
stoutest poet that did not find perfection in 
thy cheek. 

But here somebody may remind us of the 
spring showers, and what drawbacks they are 
upon going into the fields. — Not at all so, when 
the spring is really confirmed, and the showers 
but April-like and at intervals. Let us turn 
our imaginations to the bright side of spring, 
and we shall forget the showers. You see 
they have been forgotten just this moment. 
Besides, we are not likely to stray too far into 
the fields ; and if we should, are there not 
hats, bonnets, barns, cottages, elm-trees, and 
good wills ? We may make these things zests, 
if we please, instead of drawbacks. 



MAY-DAY. 



71 



XXXV.— MAY-DAY. 

May-day is a word, which used to awaken 
in the minds of our ancestors all the ideas of 
youth, and verdure, and blossoming, and love ; 
and hilarity ; in short, the union of the two 
best things in the world, the love of nature, 
and the love of each other. It was the day, 
on which the arrival of the year at maturity 
was kept, like that of a blooming heiress. 
They caught her eye as she was coming, and 
sent up hundreds of songs of joy. 

Now the bright Morning-Star, Day's harbinger, 
Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her 
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws 
The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. 

Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire 

Mirth, and youth, and warm desire : 

Woods and groves are of thy dressing ; 

Hill and dale, doth boast thy blessing. 
Thus we salute thee with our early song, 
And welcome thee, and wish thee long. 

These songs were stopped by Milton's friends 
the Puritans, whom in his old age he differed 
with, most likely on these points among others. 
But till then, they appear to have been as old, 
all over Europe, as the existence of society. 
The Druids are said to have had festivals in 
honour of May. Our Teutonic ancestors had, 
undoubtedly ; and in the countries which had 
constituted the Western Roman Empire, Flora 
still saw thanks paid for her flowers, though 
her worship had gone away*. 

The homage which was paid to the Month 
of Love and flowers, may be divided into two 
sorts, the general and the individual. The 
first consisted in going with others to gather 
May, and in joining in sports and games after- 
wards. On the first of the month, " the juve- 
nile part of both sexes," says Bourne, in his 
Popular Antiquities, " were wont to rise a little 
after midnight and walk to some neighbouring 
wood, where they broke down branches from 
the trees, and adorned them with nosegays 
and crowns of flowers. When this was done, 
they returned with their booty about the rising 
of the sun, and made their doors and windows 
to triumph in the flowery spoil. The after 
part of the day was chiefly spent in dancing 
round a May-pole, which being placed in a 
convenient part of the village, stood there, as 
it were, consecrated to the Goddess of Flowers, 
without the least violation offered to it, in the 
whole circle of the year." Spenser, in his 
Shepherd's Calendar, has detailed the circum- 
stances, in a style like a rustic dance. 

* The great May holiday observed over the West of 
Europe was known for centuries, up to a late period, under 
the name of the Belte, or Beltane. Such a number of 
etymologies, all perplexingly probable, have been found 
for this word, that we have been surprised to miss among 
them that of Bel-temps, the Fine Time or Season. Thus 
Printemps, the First Time, or Prime Season, is the 
Spring. 



Younge folke now flocken in — every where 

To gather May-buskets *— and swelling brere ; 

And home they hasten — the postes to dight, 

And all the kirk-pilours — eare day-light, 

With hawthorne buds— and sweet eglantine, 

And girlonds of roses— and soppes in wine. 

******* 

Sicker this morowe, no longer agoe, 

I saw a shole of shepherds outgoe 

With singing, and shouting, and jolly chere ; 

Before them yode t a lustie tabrere % 

That to the many a hornpipe played, 

Whereto they dauncen eche one with his mayd. 

To see these folks make such jovisaunce, 

Made my heart after the pipe to daunce. 

Tho § to the greene wood they speeden hem all, 

To fetchen home May with their musicall ; 

And home they bringen, in a royall throne, 

Crowned as king ; and his queen attone || 

Was Lady Flora, on whom did attend 

A fayre flocke of faeries, and a fresh bend 

Of lovely nymphs. O that I were there 

To helpen the ladies their May-bush beare. 

The day was passed in sociality and manly 
sports ; — in archery, and running, and pitching 
the bar, — in dancing, singing, playing music, 
acting Robin Hood and his company, and 
making a well-earned feast upon all the 
country dainties in season. It closed with an 
award of prizes. 

As I have seen the Lady of the May, 

Set in an arbour (on a holiday) 

Built by the Maypole, where the jocund swains 

Dance with the maidens to the bag-pipe's strains, 

When envious night commands them to be gone, 

Call for the merry youngsters one by one, 

And for their well performance soon disposes, 

To this a garland interwove with roses, 

To that a carved hook, or well-wrought scrip, 

Gracing another with her cherry lip ; 

To one her garter, to another then 

A handkerchief cast o'er and o'er again ; 

And none returneth empty, that hath spent 

His pains to fill their rural merriment^ . 

Among the gentry and at court the spirit of 
the same enjoyments took place, modified ac- 
cording to the taste or rank of the entertainers. 
The most universal amusement, agreeably to 
the general current in the veins, and the com- 
mon participation of flesh and blood (for rank 
knows no distinction of legs and knee-pans), 
was dancing. Contests of chivalry supplied 
the place of more rural gymnastics. But the 
most poetical and elaborate entertainment was 
the Mask. A certain flowery grace was 
sprinkled over all ; and the finest spirits of the 



* Buskets — Boskets — Bushes — from Boschetti, Ital. 

t Yode, Went. % Tabrere, a Tabourer. 

§ Tho, Then. H Attone, At once— With him. 

% Britannia's Pastorals, by William Browne. Song 
the 4th. Browne, like his friend Wither, from whom we 
quoted a passage last week, wanted strength and the 
power of selection ; though not to such an extent. He is 
however well worth reading by those who can expatiate 
over a pastoral subject, like a meadowy tract of country ; 
finding out the beautiful spots, and gratified, if not much 
delighted, with the rest. His genius, which was by no 
means destitute of the social part of passion, seems to 
have been turned almost wholly to description, by the 
beauties of his native county Devonshire. 



72 



THE INDICATOR. 



time thought they showed both their manliness 
and wisdom, in knowing how to raise the plea- 
sures of the season to their height. Sir Philip 
Sydney, the idea of whom has come down to 
us as a personification of all the refinement of 
that age, is fondly recollected by Spenser in 
this character. 

His sports were faire, his joyance innocent, 
Sweet without soure, and honey without gall : 
And he himself seemed made for merriment, 
Merrily masking both in bowre and hall. 
There was no pleasure nor delightfull play, 
"When Astrophel soever was away. 

For he could pipe, and daunce, and caroll sweet, 
Amongst the shepheards in their shearing feast ; 
As somer's larke that with her song doth greet 
The dawning day forth comming from the East. 
And layes of love he also could compose ; 
Thrice happie she, whom he to praise did choose. 

Astrophel, st. 5. 

Individual homage to the month of May 
consisted in paying respect to it though alone, 
and in plucking flowers and flowering boughs 
to adorn apartments with. 

This maiden, in a morn betime, 

Went forth when May was in the prime 

To get sweet setywall, 
The honey-suckle, the harlock, 
The lily, and the lady-smock, 

To deck her summer-hall. 

Drayton's Pastorals, Eclog. 4. 

But when morning pleasures are to be spoken 
of, the lovers of poetry who do not know 
Chaucer, are like those who do not know 
what it is to be up in the morning. He has 
left us two exquisite pictures of the solitary 
observance of May, in his Palamon and Arcite. 
They are the more curious, inasmuch as the 
actor in one is a lady, and in the other a knight. 
How far they owe any of their beauty to his 
original, the Theseide of Boccaccio, we cannot 
say ; for we never had the happiness of meet- 
ing with that rare work. The Italians have 
so neglected it, that they have not only never 
given it a rifacimento or re-modelling, as in 
the instance of Boiardo's poem, but are almost 
as much unacquainted with it, we believe, as 
foreign nations. Chaucer thought it worth his 
while to be both acquainted with it, and to 
make others so ; and we may venture to say, 
that we know of no Italian after Boccaccio's 
age who was so likely to understand him to 
the core, as his English admirer, Ariosto not 
excepted. Still, from what we have seen of 
Boccaccio's poetry, we can imagine the Theseide 
to have been too lax and long. If Chaucer's 
Palamon and Arcite be all that he thought pro- 
per to distil from it, it must have been greatly 
so ; for it was an epic. But at all events the 
essence is an exquisite one. The tree must 
have been a fine old enormity, from which such 
honey could be drawn. 

To begin, as in duty bound, with the lady. 
How she sparkles through the antiquity of the 
language, like a young beauty in an old hood ! 



Thus passeth yere by yere, and day by day, 
Till it felle ones in a morowe of May, 
That Emelie— 

But we will alter the spelling where we can, 
as in a former instance, merely to let the 
reader see what a notion is in his way, if he 
suffers the look of Chaucer's words to prevent 
his enjoying him. 

Thus passeth year by year, and day by day, 
Till it fell once, in a morrow of May, 
That Emily, that fairer was to seen , 
Than is the lily upon his stalk green, 
And fresher than the May with flowers new, 
(For with the rosy colour strove her hue ; 
I n'ot which was the finer of them two) 
Ere it was day, as she was wont to do, 
She was arisen and all ready dight, 
For May will have no sluggardy a-night : 
The season pricketh every gentle heart, 
And maketh him out of his sleep to start, 
And saith " Arise, and do thine observance." 

This maketh Emily have remembrance 
To do honour to May, and for to rise. 
Yclothed was she, fresh for to devise : 
Her yellow hair was braided in a tress, 
Behind her back, a yarde * long I guess : 
And in the garden, at the sun uprist, 
She walketh up and down where as her list ; 
She gathereth flowers, party white and red 
To make a subtle garland for her head ; 
And as an angel, heavenly she sung. 
The great tower, that was so thick and strong, 
Which of the castle was the chief dongeon, 
(Where as these knightes weren in prison, 
Of which I tolde you, and tellen shall) 
Was even joinant to the garden wall, 
There as this Emily had her playing. 

Bright was the sun, and clear that morwening— 

[How finely, to our ears at least, the second 
line of the couplet always rises up from this 
full stop at the first !] 

Bright was the sun, and clear that morwening 
And Palamon, this woeful prisoner, 
As was his wont, by leave of his jailer, 
Was risen, and roamed in a chamber on high, 
In which he all the noble city sigh t, 
And eke the garden, full of branches green, 
There as this fresh Emilia the sheen t 
Was in her walk, and roamed up and down. 

Sir "Walter Scott, in his edition of Dryden, says 
upon the passage before us, and Dryden's ver- 
sion of it, that " the modern must yield the 
palm to the ancient, in spite of the beauty of 
his versification." "We quote from memory, 
but this is the substance of his words. For 
our parts, we agree with them, as to the con- 
signment of the palm, but not as to the ex- 
ception about the versification. "With some 
allowance as to our present mode of accentua- 
tion, it appears to us to be touched with a finer 
sense of music even than Dryden's. It is more 
delicate, without any inferiority in strength, 
and still more various. 

But to our other portrait. It is as sparkling 
with young manhood, as the former is with a 

* These additional syllables are to be read slightly, 
like the e in French verse. 

t Saw. t The shining. 



MAY-DAY. 



73 



gentler freshness. What a burst of radiant 
joy is in the second couplet ; what a vital 
quickness in the comparison of the horse, 
" starting as the fire ; " and what a native and 
happy ease in the conclusion ! 

The busy lark, the messenger of day, 
Saleweth * in her song the morrow gray ; 
And fiery Phoebus riseth up so bright, 
That all the orient laugheth of the sight ; 
And with his stremes drieth in the greves t 
The silver droppes hanging in the leaves ; 
And Arcite, that is in the court real t 
With Theseus the squier principal, 
Is risen, and looketh on the merry day ; 
And for to do his observance to May, 
Rememb'ring on the point of his desire, 
He on the courser, starting as the fire, 
Is ridden to the fieldes him to play, 
Out of the court, were it a mile or tway : 
And to the grove, of which that I you told, 
By aventure his way 'gan to hold, 
To maken him a garland of the greves, 
Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leaves, 
And loud he sung against the sunny sheen : 
" O May, with all thy flowers and thy green, 
Right welcome be thou, faire freshe May : 
I hope that I some green here getten may." 
And from his courser, with a lusty heart, 
Into the grove full hastily he start, 
And in the path he roamed up and down. 

The versification of this is not so striking as 
the other, but Dryden again falls short in the 
freshness and feeling of the sentiment. His 
lines are beautiful ; but they do not come 
home to us with so happy and cordial a face. 
Here they are. The word morning in the 
first line, as it is repeated in the second, we 
are bound to consider as a slip of the pen ; per- 
haps for mounting. 

The morning-lark, the messenger of day, 

Saluteth in her song the morning gray ; 

And soon the sun arose with beams so bright, 

That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight : 

He with his tepid rays the rose renews, 

And licks the drooping leaves and dries the dews ; 

When Arcite left his bed, resolv'd to pay 

Observance to the month of merry May : 

Forth on his fiery steed betimes he rode, 

That scarcely prints the turf on which he trod : 

At ease he seemed, and prancing o'er the plains, 

Turned only to the grove his horse's reins, 

The grove I named before ; and, lighted there, 

A woodbine garland sought to crown his hair ; 

Then turned his face against the rising day, 

And raised his voice to welcome in the May : 

" For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear, 

If not the first, the fairest of the year : 

For thee the Graces lead the dancing Hours, 

And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers : 

When thy short reign is past, the feverish Sun 

The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. 

So may thy tender blossoms fear no blijht, 

Nor goats with venom'd teeth thy tendrils bite, 

As thou shalt guide my wandering steps to find 

The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind." 

His vows address'd, within the grove he stray'd. 

How poor is this to Arcite's leaping from his 
courser " with a lusty heart !" How inferior the 
common-place of the " fiery steed," which need 
not involve any actual notion in the writer's 



* Saluteth. 



\ Groves. 



$ Royal. 



mind, to the courser " starting as the fire ; " — 
how inferior the turning his face to " the rising 
day " and raising his voice to the singing t( loud 
against the sunny sheen ; " and lastly, the 
whole learned invocation and adjuration of 
May, about guiding his " wandering steps " and 
" so may thy tender blossoms " &c. to the call 
upon the " fair fresh May," ending with that 
simple, quick-hearted line, in which he hopes 
he shall get " some green here ; " a touch in 
the happiest vivacity ! Dryden's genius, for the 
most part, wanted faith in nature. It was too 
gross and sophisticate. There was as much 
difference between him and his original, as be- 
tween a hot noon in perukes at St. James's, 
and one of Chaucer's lounges on the grass, of 
a May -morning. 

All this worship of May is over now. There 
is no issuing forth, in glad companies, to gather 
boughs ; no adorning of houses with " the 
flowery spoil ;" no songs, no dances, no village 
sports and coronations, no courtly poetries, no 
sense and acknowledgment of the quiet pre- 
sence of nature, in grove or glade. 

O dolce primavera, o fior novelli, 

O aure, o arboscelli, o fresche erbette, 

O piagge benedette ; o colli, o monti, 

O valli, o fiumi, o fonti, o verdi rivi, 

Palme lauri, ed olive, edere e mirti ; 

O gloriosi spiriti de gli boschi ; 

O Eco, o antri foschi, o chiare linfe, 

O faretrate ninfe, o agresti Pani, 

O Satiri e Silvani, o Fauni e Driadi, 

Naiadi ed Amadriadi, o Semidee, 

Oreadi e Napee, — or siete sole. — Sannazzaro. 

O thou delicious spring, O ye new flowers, 

O airs, O youngling bowers ; fresh thickening grass, 

And plains beneath heaven's face ; hills and mountains, 

Valleys, and streams, and fountains ; banks of green, 

Myrtles, and palms serene, ivies, and bays ; 

And ye who warmed old lays, spirits o' the woods, 

Echoes, and solitudes, and lakes of light ; 

O quivered virgins bright, Pans rustical, 

Satyrs and Sy Ivans all, Dryads, and ye 

That up the mountains be ; and ye beneath 

In meadow or flowery heath, — ye are alone. 

Two hundred years ago, our ancestors used 
to delight in anticipating their May holidays. 
Bigotry came in, and frowned them away; 
then Debauchery, and identified all pleasures 
with the town ; then Avarice, and we have 
ever since been mistaking the means for the 
end. 

Fortunately, it does not follow that we shall 
continue to do so. Commerce, while it thinks it 
is only exchanging commodities, is helping to 
diffuse knowledge. All other gains, — all 
selfish and extravagant systems of acquisition, 
• — tend to over-do themselves, and to topple 
down by their own undiffused magnitude. The 
world, as it learns other things, may learn not 
to confound the means with the end, or at least 
(to speak more philosophically), a really poor 
means with a really richer. The veriest 
cricket-player on a green has as sufficient a 
quantity of excitement as a fundholder or a 



74 



THE INDICATOR. 



partisan ; and health, and spirits, and manliness 
to boot. Knowledge may go on ; must do so, 
from necessity ; and should do so, for the ends 
we speak of ; but knowledge, so far from being 
incompatible with simplicity of pleasures, is 
the quickest to perceive its wealth. Chaucer 
would lie for hours, looking at the daisies. 
Scipio and Lselius could amuse themselves with 
making ducks and drakes on the water. Epa- 
minondas, the greatest of all the active spirits 
of Greece, was a flute-player and dancer. 
Alfred the Great could act the whole part of a 
minstrel. Epicurus taught the riches of tem- 
perance and intellectual pleasure in a garden. 
The other philosophers of his country walked 
between heaven and earth in the colloquial 
bowers of Academus ; and " the wisest heart 
of Solomon," who found everything vain be- 
cause he was a king, has left us panegyrics on 
the Spring and the "voice of the turtle," 
because he was a poet, a lover, and a wise man. 



XXXVI.— SHAKSPEARE'S BIRTH-DAY. 

The fifth of May, making the due allowance 
of twelve days from the twenty-third of April, 
according to the change of the Style, is the birth- 
day of Shakspeare. Pleasant thoughts must 
be associated with him in everything. If he is 
not to be born in April, he must be born in May. 
Nature will have him with her on her blithest 
holidays, like her favourite lover. 

O thou divine human creature — greater 
name than even divine poet or divine philoso- 
pher — and yet thou wast all three — a very 
spring and vernal abundance of all fair and 
noble things is to be found in thy productions ! 
They are truly a second nature. "We walk in 
them, with whatever society we please ; either 
with men, or fair women, or circling spirits, or 
with none but the whispering airs and leaves. 
Thou makest worlds of green trees and gentle 
natures for us, in thy forests of Arden, and thy 
courtly retirements of Navarre. Thou bringest 
us among the holiday lasses on the green 
sward ; layest us to sleep among fairies in the 
bowers of midsummer ; wakest us with the 
song of the lark and the silver-sweet voices of 
lovers : bringest more music to our ears, both 
from earth and from the planets ; anon settest 
us upon enchanted islands, where it welcomes 
us again, from the touching of invisible instru- 
ments ; and after all, restorest us to our still 
desired haven, the arms of humanity. Whe- 
ther grieving us or making us glad, thou 
makest us kinder and happier. The tears which 
thou fetchest down, are like the rains of April, 
softening the times that come after them. 
Thy smiles are those of the month of love, the 
more blessed and universal for the tears. 

The birth-days of such men as Shakspeare 
ought to be kept, in common gratitude and 



affection, like those of relations whom we love. 
He has said, in a line full of him, that 

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. 

How near does he become to us with his thou- 
sand touches ! The lustre and utility of intel- 
lectual power is so increasing in the eyes of 
the world, that we do not despair of seeing the 
time when his birthday will be a subject of 
public rejoicing ; when the regular feast will 
be served up in tavern and dwelling-house, the 
bust crowned with laurel, and the theatres 
sparkle with illuminations. 

In the mean time, it is in the power of every 
admirer of Shakspeare to honour the day 
privately. Rich or poor, busy or at leisure, all 
may do it. The busiest finds time to eat his 
dinner, and may pitch one considerate glass of 
wine down his throat. The poorest may call 
him to mind, and drink his memory in honest 
water. We had mechanically written health, as 
if he were alive. So he is in spirit ;— and the 
spirit of such a writer is so constantly with us, 
that it would be a good thing, a judicious ex- 
travagance, a contemplative piece of jollity, to 
drink his health instead of his memory. But 
this, we fear, should be an impulse. We must 
content ourselves with having felt it here, and 
drinking it in imagination. To act upon it, 
as a proposal of the day before yesterday, 
might be too much like getting up an extem- 
pore gesture, or practising an unspeakable 
satisfaction. 

An outline, however, may be drawn of the 
manner in which such a birth-day might be 
spent. The tone and colouring would be filled 
up, of course, according to the taste of the 
parties. — If any of our readers, then, have 
leisure as well as inclination to devote a day to 
the memory of Shakspeare, we would advise 
them, in the first place, to walk out, whether 
alone or in company, and enjoy during the 
morning as much as possible of those beauties 
of nature, of which he has left us such exquisite 
pictures. They would take a volume of him in 
their hands the most suitable to the occasion ; 
not to hold themselves bound to sit down and 
read it, nor even to refer to it, if the original 
work of nature should occupy them too much ; 
but to read it, if they read anything ; and to 
feel that Shakspeare was with them substan- 
tially as well as spiritually ; — that they had 
him with them under their arm. There is 
another thought connected with his presence, 
which may render the Londoner's walk the 
more interesting. Shakspeare had neither the 
vanity which induces a man to be disgusted 
with what everybody can enjoy ; nor, on the 
other hand, the involuntary self-degradation 
which renders us incapable of enjoying what is 
abased by our own familiarity of acquaintance- 
ship. About the metropolis, therefore, there is 
perhaps not a single rural spot, any more than 
about Stratford-upon-Avon, which he has not 



LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY. 



75 



himself enjoyed. The south side of London 
was the one nearest his theatre. Hyde Park 
was then, as it is now, one of the fashionable 
promenades. Richmond also was in high pride 
of estimation. At Greenwich Elizabeth held 
her court, and walked abroad amid the gallant 
service of the Sydneys and Raleighs. And 
Hampstead and Highgate, with the country 
about them, were, as they have been ever since, 
the favourite resort of the lovers of natural 
productions. Nay, without repeating what we 
said in a former number about the Mermaid in 
Cornhill, the Devil Tavern in Fleet-street, the 
Boar's Head in Eastcheap, and other town 
associations with Shakspeare, the reader who 
cannot get out of London on his birth-day, and 
who has the luck to be hard at work in 
Chancery-lane or the Borough, may be pretty 
certain that Shakspeare has admired the fields 
and the May flowers there ; for the fields were 
close to the latter, perhaps came up to the very 
walls of the theatre ; and the suburban mansion 
and gardens of his friend Lord Southampton 
occupied the spot now called Southampton- 
buildings. It was really a country neighbour- 
hood. The Old Bourne (Holborn) ran by with 
a bridge over it ; and Gray's Inn was an Aca- 
demic bower in the fields. 

The dinner does not much signify. The 
sparest or the most abundant will suit the 
various fortunes of the great poet ; only it will 
be as well for those who can afford wine, to 
pledge Falstaff in a cup of "sherris sack," 
which seems to have been a sort of sherry 
negus. After dinner Shakspeare's volumes 
will come well on the table ; lying among the 
dessert like laurels, where there is one, and sup- 
plying it where there is not. Instead of songs, 
the persons present may be called upon for 
scenes. But no stress need be laid on this 
proposition, if they do not like to read out 
aloud. The pleasure of the day should be as 
much at liberty as possible ; and if the com- 
pany prefer conversation, it will not be very 
easy for them to touch upon any subject which 
Shakspeare shall not have touched upon also. If 
the enthusiasm is in high taste, the ladies 
should be crowned with violets, which (next to 
the roses of their lips) seem to have been his 
favourite flower. After tea should come 
singing and music, especially the songs which 
Arne set from his plays, and the ballad of Tliou 
soft-flowing Awn. If an engraving or bust of 
him could occupy the principal place in the 
room, it would look like the " present deity" of 
the occasion ; and we have known a very 
pleasant effect produced by everybody's bringing 
some quotation applicable to him from his 
works, and laying it before his image, to be 
read in the course of the evening. 



XXXVII.— LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY. 

Among the pieces printed at the end of 
Chaucer's works, and attributed to him, is a 
translation, under this title, of a poem of the 
celebrated Alain Chartier, secretary to Charles 
the Sixth and Seventh. It was the title which 
suggested to a friend the verses at the end of 
our present Number*. "We wish Alain could 
have seen them. He would have found a 
Troubadour air for them, and sung them to 
La Belle Dame Agnes Sorel, who was, however, 
not Sans Mercy. The union of the imaginative 
and the real is very striking throughout, parti- 
cularly in the dream. The wild gentleness of 
the rest of the thoughts and of the music are 
alike old, and they are also alike young ; for 
love and imagination are always young, let 
them bring with them what times and accom- 
paniments they may. If we take real flesh and 
blood with us, we may throw ourselves, on the 
facile wings of our sympathy, into what age we 
please. It is only by trying to feel, as well as 
to fancy, through the medium of a costume, 
that writers become fleshless masks and cloaks 
— things like the trophies of the ancients, when 
they hung up the empty armour of an enemy. 

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY. 

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, 

Alone and palely loitering ? 
The sedge is wither'd from the lake, 

And no birds sing. 

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, 

So haggard and so woe-begone ? 
The squirrel's granary is full, 

And the harvest 's done. 

I see a lily on thy brow, 

With anguish moist and fever dew ; 
And on thy cheek a fading rose 

Fast withereth too. 

I met a lady in the meads, 

Full beautiful, a fairy's child ; 
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 

And her eyes were wild. 

I set her on my pacing steed, 

And nothing else saw all day long ; 

For sideways would she lean and sing 
A fairy's song. 

I made a garland for her head, 

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone ; 

She look'd at me as she did love, 
And made sweet moan. 

She found me roots of relish sweet, 
And honey wild, and manna dew ; 

And sure in language strange she said, 
I love thee true. 

She took me to her elfin grot, 

And there she gazed and sighed deep, 

And there I shut her wild sad eyes — 
So kiss'd to sleep. 

* The late Mr. Keats. This beautiful little effusion is 
reprinted in the Indicator, where it originally appeared, 
because it is not to be found in the collected works of that 
delightful poet. 



76 



THE INDICATOR. 



And there we slumber'd on the moss, 
And there I dream 'd, ah woe betide 

The latest dream I ever dream'd 
On the cold hill side. 

I saw pale kings, and princes too, 

Pale warriors, death -pale were they all; 

Who cried, " La Belle Dame Sans Mercy 
Hath thee in thrall ! " 

I saw their starved lips in the gloom 

With horrid warning gaped wide, 
And I awoke and found me here. 

On the cold hill side. 

And this is why I sojourn here, 

Alone and palely loitering, 
Though the sedge is wither'd from the laic e, 

And no birds sing. 

Caviar b.* 



XXXVIII. OF STICKS. 

Among other comparative injuries which we 
are accustomed to do to the characters of things 
animate and inanimate, in order to gratify our 
human vanity, such as calling a rascal a dog 
(which is a great compliment), and saying that 
a tyrant makes a beast of himself (which it 
would be a very good thing, and a lift in the 
world, if he could), is a habit in which some 
persons indulge themselves, of calling insipid 
things and persons sticks. Such and such a one 
is said to write a stick ; and such another is 
himself called a stick ; — a poor stick, a mere 
stick, a stick of a fellow. 

"We protest against this injustice done to 
those useful and once flourishing sons of a good 
old stock. Take, for instance, a common cherry 
stick, which is one of the favourite sort. In 
the first place, it is a very pleasant substance 
to look at, the grain running round it in glossy 
and shadowy rings. Then it is of primaeval 
antiquity, handed down from scion to scion 
through the most flourishing of genealogical 
trees. In the third place, it is of Eastern 
origin ; of a stock, which it is possible may 
have furnished Haroun Al Raschid with a 
djereed, or Mahomet with a camel-stick, or 
Xenophon in his famous retreat with fences, 
or Xerxes with tent-pins, or Alexander with a 
javelin, or Sardanapalus with tarts, or Solomon 
with a simile for his mistress' lips, or Jacob 
with a crook, or Methusalem with shadow, or 
Zoroaster with mathematical instruments, or 
the builders of Babel with scaffolding. Lastly, 
how do you know but that you may have eaten 
cherries off this very stick ? for it was once 
alive with sap, and rustling with foliage, and 
powdered with blossoms, and red and laughing 
with fruit. "Where the leathern tassel now 
hangs, may have dangled a bunch of berries ; 
and instead of the brass ferule poking in the 



* " Caviare to the multitude." — Hamlet. The signature 
was of Mr. Keats's own putting ; a touching circumstance, 
when we call to mind the treatment he met with, and 
consider how hiB memory has triumphed over it. 



mud, the tip was growing into the air with its 
youngest green. 

The use of sticks in general is of the very 
greatest antiquity. It is impossible to conceive 
a state of society in which boughs should not 
be plucked from trees for some purpose of 
utility or amusement. Savages use clubs, 
hunters require lances, and shepherds their 
crooks. Then came the sceptre, which is ori- 
ginally nothing but a staff, or a lance, or a 
crook, distinguished from others. The Greek 
word for sceptre signifies also a walking-stick. 
A mace, however plumped up and disguised 
with gilding and a heavy crown, is only the 
same thing in the hands of an inferior ruler ; 
and so are all other sticks used in office, from 
the baton of the Grand Constable of France 
down to the tipstaff of a constable in Bow-street. 
As the shepherd's dog is the origin of the gen- 
tlest whelp that lies on a hearth-cushion, and 
of the most pompous barker that jumps about 
a pair of greys, so the merest stick used by a 
modern Arcadian, when he is driving his flock 
to Leadenhall-market with a piece of candle in 
his hat, and No. 554 on his arm, is the first 
great parent and original of all authoritative 
staves, from the beadle's cane wherewith he 
terrifies charity-boys who eat bull's-eyes in 
church-time, up to the silver mace of the ver- 
ger, to the wands of parishes and governors, — 
the tasselled staff, wherewith the Band-Major 
so loftily picks out his measured way before 
the musicians, and which he holds up when 
they are to cease ; to the White Staff of the 
Lord Treasurer ; the court- officer emphatically 
called the Lord Gold Stick ; the Bishop's 
Crosier (Pedum Episcopale), whereby he is 
supposed to pull back the feet of his straying 
flock ; and the royal and imperial sceptre 
aforesaid, whose holders, formerly called Shep- 
herds of the people (noijueVes Aa£>i>), were sedi- 
tiously said to fleece more than to protect. 
The Vaulting-Staff, a luxurious instrument of 
exercise, must have been used in times imme- 
morial for passing streams and rough ground 
with. It is the ancestor of the staff with 
which Pilgrims travelled. The Staff and 
Quarter-Staff of the country Robin Hoods is 
a remnant of the war-club. So is the Irish 
Shilelah, which a friend has well defined to be 
" a stick with two butt-ends." The originals of 
all these, that are not extant in our own coun- 
try, may still be seen wherever there are nations 
uncivilised. The Negro Prince, who asked our 
countrymen what was said of him in Europe, 
was surrounded in state with a parcel of ragged 
fellows with shilelahs over their shoulders — 
Lord Old Sticks. 

But sticks have been great favourites with 
civilised as well as uncivilised nations ; only 
the former have used them more for help and 
ornament. The Greeks were a sceptropherous 
people. Homer probably used a walking-stick 
because he was blind : but we have it on au- 



OF STICKS. 



77 



thority that Socrates did. On his first meeting 
with Xenophon, which was in a narrow passage, 
he barred up the way with his stick, and asked 
him, in his good-natured manner, where provi- 
sions were to be had. Xenophon having told 
him, he asked again, if he knew where virtue 
and wisdom were to be had ; and this reducing 
the young man to a nonplus, he said, " Follow 
me, and learn ;" which Xenophon did, and be- 
came the great man we have all heard of. The 
fatherly story of Agesilaus, who was caught 
amusing his little boy with riding on a stick, 
and asked his visitor whether he was a father, 
is too well known for repetition. 

There is an illustrious anecdote connected 
with our subject in Roman history. The highest 
compliment which his countrymen thought 
they could pay to the first Scipio, was to call 
him a walking-stick ; for such is the signifi- 
cation of his name. It was given him for the 
filial zeal with which he used to help his old 
father about, serving his decrepit age instead 
of a staff. But the Romans were not remark- 
able for sentiment. What we hear in general 
of their sticks, is the thumpings which servants 
get in their plays ; and above all, the famous 
rods which the lictors carried, and which being 
actual sticks, must have inflicted horrible 
dull bruises and malignant stripes. They 
were pretty things, it must be confessed, to 
carry before the chief magistrate ! just as if the 
King or the Lord Chancellor were to be pre- 
ceded by a cat-o' -nine-tails. 

Sticks are not at all in such request with mo- 
dern times as they were. Formerly, we suspect, 
most of the poorer rank's in England used to 
carry them, both on account of the prevalence 
of manly sports, and for security in travelling ; 
for before the invention of posts and mail- 
coaches, a trip to Scotland or Northumberland 
was a thing to make a man write his will. As 
they came to be ornamented, fashion adopted 
them. The Cavaliers of Charles the First's 
time were a sticked race, as well as the apo- 
stolic divines and puritans, who appear to have 
carried staves, because they read of them 
among the patriarchs. Charles the First, when 
at his trial, held out his stick to forbid the 
Attorney-General's proceeding. There is an 
interesting little story connected with a stick, 
which is related of Andrew Marvell's father, 
(worthy of such a son,) and which, as it is 
little known, we will repeat ; though it re- 
spects the man more than the machine. He 
had been visited by a young lady, who in spite 
of a stormy evening persisted in returning 
across the Humber, because her family would 
be alarmed at her absence. The old gentle- 
man, high-hearted and cheerful, after vainly 
trying to dissuade her from perils which he 
understood better than she, resolved in his 
gallantry to bear her company. He accordingly 
walked with her down to the shore, and getting 
into the boat, threw his stick to a friend, with 



a request, in a lively tone of voice, that he 
would preserve it for a keepsake. He then 
cried out merrily <e Ho-hoy for heaven !" and 
put off with his visitor. They were drowned. 
As commerce increased, exotic sticks grew 
in request from the Indies. Hence the Bamboo, 
the Whanghee, the Jambee which makes such 
a genteel figure under Mr. Lilly's auspices in 
the Tatler ; and our light modern cane, which 
the Sunday stroller biiys at sixpence the piece, 
with a twist of it at the end for a handle. The 
physicians, till within the last few score of 
years, retained among other fopperies which 
they converted into gravities, the wig and gold- 
headed cane. The latter had been an indis- 
pensable sign-royal of fashion, and was turned 
to infinite purposes of accomplished gesticula- 
tion. One of the most courtly personages in 
the Rape of the Lock is 

Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, 
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane. 

Sir Richard Steele, as we have before noticed, 
is reproached by a busy-body of those times 
for a habit of jerking his stick against the 
pavement as he walked. When swords were 
abolished by Act of Parliament, the tavern- 
boys took to pinking each other, as injuriously 
as they could well manage, with their walking- 
sticks. Macklin the player was tried for his 
life for poking a man's eye out in this way. 
Perhaps this helped to bring the stick into 
disrepute ; for the use of it seems to have 
declined more and more, till it is now confined 
to old men, and a few among the younger. It 
is unsuitable to our money-getting mode of 
rushing hither and thither. Instead of pinking 
a man's ribs or so, or thrusting out his eye 
from an excess of the jovial, we break his 
heart with a bankruptcy. 

Canes became so common before the decline 
of the use of sticks, that whenever a man is 
beaten with a stick, let it be of what sort it 
may, it is still common to say that he has had 
a " caning :" which reminds us of an anecdote 
more agreeable than surprising ; though the 
patient doubtless thought the reverse. A gen- 
tleman, who was remarkable for the amenity 
of his manners, accompanied by a something 
which a bully might think it safe to presume 
upon, found himself compelled to address a 
person who did not know how to " translate 
his style," in the following words, which were 
all delivered in the sweetest tone in the world, 
with an air of almost hushing gentility : — u Sir, 
I am extremely sorry — to be obliged to say, — 
that you appear to have a very erroneous notion 
of the manners that become your situation in 
life ; — and I am compelled with great reluc- 
tance, to add," (here he became still softer and 
more delicate) K that, if you do not think fit, 
upon reflection, to alter this very extraordinary 
conduct towards a gentleman, I shall be under 
the necessity of caning you." The other 



r 



78 



THE INDICATOR. 



treated the thing as a joke ; and to the delight of 
the by-standers, received a very grave drubbing. 
There are two eminent threats connected 
with caning, in the history of Dr. Johnson. 
One was from himself, when he was told that 
Foote intended to mimic him on the stage. 
He replied, that if " the dog" ventured to play 
his tricks with him, he would step out of the 
stage-box, chastise him before the audience, 
and then throw himself upon their candour and 
common sympathy. Foote desisted, as he had 
good reason to do. The Doctor would have 
read him a stout lesson, and then made a speech 
to the audience as forcible ; so that the the- 
atrical annals have to regret, that the subject 
and Foote's shoulders were not afforded him 
to expatiate upon. It would have been a fine 
involuntary piece of acting, — the part of Scipio 
by Dr. Johnson. — The other threat was against 
the Doctor himself from Macpherson, the 
compounder of Ossian. It was for denying 
the authenticity of that work ; a provocation 
the more annoying, inasmuch as he did not 
seem duly sensible of its merits. Johnson 
replied to Macpherson's letter by one of con- 
temptuous brevity and pith ; and contented 
himself with carrying about a large stick, with 
which he intended to repel Macpherson in case 
of an assault. Had they met, it would have 
been like " two clouds over the Caspian ;" for 
both were large-built men. 

We recollect another bacular Johnsonian 
anecdote. When he was travelling in Scotland, 
he lost a huge stick of his in the little treeless 
island of Mull. Boswell told him he would 
recover it : but the Doctor shook his head. 
" No, no," said he ; " let anybody in Mull get 
possession of it, and it will never be restored. 
Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of 
timber here." 

The most venerable sticks now surviving 
are the smooth amber-coloured canes, in the 
possession of old ladies. They have sometimes 
a gold head, but oftener a crook of ivory. But 
they have latterly been much displaced by 
light umbrellas, the handles of which are imi- 
tations of them ; and these are gradually 
retreating before the young parasol, especially 
about town. The old ladies take the wings of 
the stage-coaches, and are run away with by 
John Pullen, in a style of infinite convenience. 
The other sticks in use are for the most part 
of cherry, oak, and crab, and seldom adorned 
with more than a leathern tassel : often with 
nothing. Bamboo and other canes do not 
abound, as might be expected from our inter- 
course with India ; but commerce in this as in 
other respects has overshot its mark. People 
cannot afford to use sticks, any more than bees 
could in their hives. Of the common sabbatical 
cane we have already spoken. There is a 
sufficing little manual, equally light and lissom, 
yclept an ebony switch ; but we have not seen 
it often. 



That sticks, however, are not to be despised 
by the leisurely, any one who has known what 
it is to want words, or to slice off the head of 
a thistle, will allow. The utility of the stick 
seems divisible into three heads : first, to give 
a general consciousness of power ; second, 
which may be called a part of the first, to help 
the demeanour ; and third, which may be 
called a part of the second, to assist a man 
over the gaps of speech — the little awkward 
intervals, called want of ideas. 

Deprive a man of his stick, who is accustomed 
to carry one, and with what a diminished sense 
of vigour and gracefulness he issues out of his 
house ! Wanting his stick, he wants himself. 
His self-possession, like Acres's on the duel- 
ground, has gone out of his fingers' ends ; but 
restore it him, and how he resumes his energy ! 
If a common walking-stick, he cherishes the 
top of it with his fingers, putting them out and 
back again, with a fresh desire to feel it in his 
palm ! How he strikes it against the ground, 
and feels power come back to his arm ! How 
he makes the pavement ring with the ferule, 
if in a street ; or decapitates the downy thistles 
aforesaid, if in a field ! Then if it be a switch, 
how firmly he jerks his step at the first inflic- 
tion of it on the air ! How he quivers the 
point of it as he goes, holding the handle with 
a straight-dropped arm and a tight grasp! 
How his foot keeps time to the switches ! How 
he twigs the luckless pieces of lilac or other 
shrubs, that peep out of a garden railing ! And 
if a sneaking-looking dog is coming by, how he 
longs to exercise his despotism and his moral 
sense at once, by giving him an invigorating 
twinge ! 

But what would certain men of address do 
without their cane or switch ? There is an 
undoubted Hhabdosophy, Sceptrosophy, or 
Wisdom of the Stick, besides the famous 
Divining Rod, with which people used to dis- 
cover treasures and fountains. It supplies a 
man with inaudible remarks, and an inex- 
pressible number of graces. Sometimes, breath- 
ing between his teeth, he will twirl the end of 
it upon his stretched-out toe ; and this means, 
that he has an infinite number of easy and 
powerful things to say, if he had a mind. 
Sometimes he holds it upright between his 
knees, and tattoos it against his teeth or under- 
lip, which implies that he meditates coolly. 
On other occasions he switches the side of his 
boot with it, which announces elegance in 
general. Lastly, if he has not a bon-mot ready 
in answer to one, he has only to thrust his 
stick at your ribs, and say, "Ah ! you rogue !" 
which sets him above you in an instant, as a 
sort of patronising wit, who can dispense with 
the necessity of joking. 

At the same time, to give it its due zest in 
life, a stick has its inconveniences. If you have 
yellow gloves on, and drop it in the mud, a too 
hasty recovery is awkward. To have it stick 



OF THE SIGHT OF SHOPS. 



79 



between the stones of a pavement is not 
! pleasant, especially if it snap the ferule off; 
! or more especially if an old gentleman or lady 
is coming behind yon, and after making them 
start back with winking eyes, it threatens to 
trip them up. To lose the ferule on a country 
road, renders the end liable to the growth of a 
sordid brush, which, not having a knife with 
you, or a shop in which to borrow one, goes 
pounding the wet up against your legs. In a 
crowded street you may have the stick driven 
into a large pane of glass ; upon which an un- 
thinking tradesman, utterly indifferent to a 
chain of events, issues forth and demands 
twelve and sixpence. 



XXXIX.—OF THE SIGHT OF SHOPS. 

Though we are such lovers of the country, 
we can admire London in some points of view; 
and among others, from the entertainment to 
be derived from its shops. Their variety and 
i brilliancy can hardly fail of attracting the 
! most sluggish attention : and besides reasons of 
J this kind, we can never look at some of them 
; without thinking of the gallant figure they 
| make in the Arabian Nights, with their Bazaars 
J and Bezesteins ; where the most beautiful of 
unknowns goes shopping in a veil, and the 
most graceful of drapers is taken blindfold to 
see her. He goes, too smitten at heart to think 
of the danger of his head ; and finds her seated 
among her slaves (exquisite themselves, only 
very inferior), upon which she encourages him 
! to sit near her, and lutes are played ; upon 
which he sighs, and cannot help looking ten- 
derly ; upon which she claps her hands, and a 
charming collation is brought in ; upon which 
they eat, but not much. A dance ensues, and 
the ocular sympathy is growing tenderer, when 
an impossible old woman appears, and says 
that the Sultan is coming. Alas ! How often 
have we been waked up, in the person of the 
young draper or jeweller, by that ancient ob- 
jection ! How have we received the lady in 
the veil, through which we saw nothing but 
her dark eyes and rosy cheeks ! How have 
we sat cross-legged on cushions, hearing or 
handling the lute, whose sounds faded away 
like our enamoured eyes ! How often have 
we not lost our hearts and left-hands, like one 
of the Calendars ? Or an eye, like another ? 
Or a head ; and resumed it at the end of the 
story ? Or slept (no, not slept) in the Sultan's 
garden at Schiraz with the fair Persian. 

But to return (as well as such enamoured 
persons can) to our shops. We prefer the 
country a million times over for walking in 
generally, especially if we have the friends in 
it that enjoy it as well ; but there are seasons 
when the very streets may vie with it. If you 
have been solitary, for instance, for a long time, 



it is pleasant to get among your fellow-crea- 
tures again, even to be jostled and elbowed. 
If you live in town, and the weather is showery, 
you may get out in the intervals of rain, and 
then a quickly-dried pavement and a set of 
brilliant shops are pleasant. Nay, we have 
known days, even in spring, when a street shall 
outdo the finest aspects of the country ; but 
then it is only when the ladies are abroad, and 
there happens to be a run of agreeable faces 
that day. For whether it is fancy or not, or 
whether certain days do not rather bring out 
certain people, it is a common remark, that 
one morning you shall meet a succession of 
good looks, and another encounter none but 
the reverse. We do not merely speak of 
handsome faces ; but of those which are charm- 
ing, or otherwise, whatever be the cause. We 
suppose, that the money-takers are all abroad 
one day, and the heart-takers the other. 

It is to be observed, that we are not speak- 
ing of utility in this article, except indeed the 
great utility of agreeableness. A candid lea- 
ther-cutter therefore will pardon us, if we do 
not find anything very attractive in his pre- 
mises. So will his friend the shoemaker, who 
is bound to like us rural pedestrians. A sta- 
tioner too, on obvious accounts, will excuse us 
for thinking his a very dull and bald-headed 
business. We cannot bear the horribly neat 
monotony of his shelves, with their load of 
virgin paper, their slates and slate-pencils that 
set one's teeth on edge, their pocket-books, 
and above all, their detestable ruled account- 
books, which at once remind one of the ne- 
cessity of writing, and the impossibility of 
writing anything pleasant on such pages. The 
only agreeable thing, in a stationer's shop 
when it has it, is the ornamental work, the 
card-racks, hand-screens, &c. which remind us 
of the fair morning fingers that paste and gild 
such things, and surprise their aunts with pre- 
sents of flowery boxes. But we grieve to add, 
that the prints which the stationers furnish 
for such elegancies, are not in the very highest 
taste. They are apt to deviate too scrupulously 
from the originals. Their well-known heads 
become too anonymous. Their young ladies 
have casts in their eyes, a little too much on 
one side even for the sidelong divinities of Mr. 
Harlowe. 

In a hatter's shop we can see nothing but 
the hats ; and the reader is acquainted with 
our pique against them. The beaver is a curi- 
ous animal, but the idea of it is not entertain- 
ing enough to convert a window full of those 
requisite nuisances into an agreeable spectacle. 
It is true, a hatter, like some other tradesmen, 
may be pleasanter himself, by reason of the 
adversity of his situation. We cannot say 
more for the cmeZ-shop next door, — a name 
justly provocative of a pun. It is customary, 
however, to have sign-paintings of Adam and 
Eve at these places ; which is some relief 



80 



THE INDICATOR. 



to the monotony of the windows ; only they 
remind us but too well of these cruel neces- 
sities to which they brought us. The baker's 
next ensuing is a very dull shop, much in- 
ferior to the gingerbread baker's, whose par- 
liament we used to munch at school. The 
tailor's makes one as melancholy to look at 
it, as the sedentary persons within. The ho- 
sier's is worse ; particularly if it has a Golden 
Leg over it ; for that precious limb is certainly 
not symbolical of the weaver's. The windows, 
half board and half dusty glass, which abound 
in the City, can scarcely be turned to a purpose 
of amusement, even by the most attic of dry- 
salters. Weown we have half a longing to break 
them, and let in the light of nature upon 
their recesses ; whether they belong to those 
more piquant gentlemen, or to bankers, or any 
other high and wholesale personages. A light 
in one of these windows in the morning is, to 
us, one of the very dismallest reflections on 
humanity. "We wish we could say something 
for a tallow-chandler's, because everybody 
abuses it : but we cannot. It must bear its 
fate like the man. A good deal might be said 
in behalf of candle-light ; but in passing from 
shop to shop, the variety is so great, that 
the imagination has not time to dwell on any 
one in particular. The ideas they suggest 
must be obvious and on the surface. A grocer's 
and tea-dealer's is a good thing. It fills the 
mind instantly with a variety of pleasant tastes, 
as the ladies in Italy on certain holidays pelt 
the gentlemen with sweetmeats. An under- 
taker's is as great a balk to one's spirits, as 
a loose stone to one's foot. It gives one a 
deadly jerk. But it is pleasant upon the 
whole to see the inhabitant looking carelessly 
out of doors, or hammering while humming a 
tune ; for why should he die a death at every 
fresh order for a coffin ? An undertaker walk- 
ing merrily drunk by the side of a hearse, is a 
norrid object ; but an undertaker singing and 
nammering in his shop, is only rapping death 
nimself on the knuckles. The dead are not 
there ; the altered fellow-creature is not there; 
out only the living man, and the abstract idea 
of death ; and he may defy that as much as he 
pleases. An apothecary's is the more deadly 
thing of the two ; for the coffin may be made 
for a good old age, but the draught and the 
drug are for the sickly. An apothecary's looks 
well however at night-time, on account of the 
coloured glasses. It is curious to see two or 
three people talking together in the light of 
one of them, and looking profoundly blue. 
There are two good things in the Italian ware- 
house, — its name and its olives ; but it is 
chiefly built up of gout. Nothing can be got 
out of a brazier's windows, except by a thief : 
but we understand that it is a good place to 
ive at for those who cannot procure water- 
falls. A music-shop with its windows full of 
title-pages, is provokingly insipid to look at, 



considering the quantity of slumbering en- 
chantment inside, which only wants waking. 
A bookseller's is interesting, especially if the 
books are very old or very new, and have fron- 
tispieces. But let no author, with or without 
money in his pocket, trust himself in the in- 
side, unless, like the bookseller, he has too 
much at home. An author is like a baker ; 
it is for him to make the sweets, and others to 
buy and enjoy them. And yet not so. Let us 
not blaspheme the " divinity that stirs within 
us." The old comparison of the bee is better ; 
for even if his toil at last is his destruction, 
and he is killed in order to be plundered, he 
has had the range of nature before he dies. 
His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, 
and the flowers ; and gentle ears have listened 
to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him. 
Let others eat his honey that please, so that 
he has had his morsel and his song. — A book- 
stall is better for an author than a regular 
shop ; for the books are cheaper, the choice 
often better and more ancient ; and he may 
look at them, and move on without the hor- 
rors of not buying anything ; unless indeed the 
master or mistress stands looking at him from 
the shop-door ; which is a vile practice. It is 
necessary, we suppose, to guard against pilferers ; 
but then ought not a stall-keeper, of any per- 
ception, to know one of us real magnanimous 
spoilers of our gloves from a sordid thief ? A 
tavern and coffee-house is a pleasant sight, 
from its sociality ; not to mention the illus- 
trious club memories of the times of Shakspeare 
and the Tatlers. We confess that the com- 
monest public-house in town is not such an 
eyesore to us as it is to some. There may be 
a little too much drinking and roaring going 
on in the middle of the week ; but what, in the 
mean time, are pride, and avarice, and all the 
unsocial vices about? Before we object to 
public-houses, and above all to their Saturday 
evening recreations, we must alter the systems 
that make them a necessary comfort to the 
poor and laborious. Till then, in spite of the 
vulgar part of the polite, we shall have an 
esteem for the " Devil and the Bag o' Nails ;" 
and like to hear, as we go along on Saturday 
night, the applauding knocks on the table that 
follow the song of " Lovely Nan" or te Brave 
Captain Death" or " Tobacco is an Indian Weed" 
or " Why, Soldiers, why ; " or " Says Plato, why 
should man be vain ; " or that judicious and un- 
answerable ditty commencing 

Now what can man more desire 
Nor sitting by a sea-coal fire : 
And on his knees, &c. 

We will even refuse to hear anything against 
a gin-shop, till the various systems of the 
moralists and economists are discussed, and 
the virtuous leave off seduction and old port. 
In the mean time, we give up to anybody's dis- 
like the butcher's and fishmonger's. And yet 



A NEARER VIEW OF SOME OF THE SHOPS. 



81 



see how things go by comparison. We re- 
member, in our boyhood, a lady from the West 
Indies, of a very delicate and high-bred nature, 
who could find nothing about our streets that 
more excited her admiration than the butchers' 
shops. She had no notion, from what she had 
seen in her own country, that so ugly a business 
could be carried on with so much neatness, and 
become actually passable. An open potato- 
shop is a dull bleak-looking place, except in the 
height of summer. A cheesemonger's is then 
at its height of annoyance, unless you see a 
paviour or bricklayer coming out with his 
three penn'orth on his bread — a better sight 
than the glutton's waddling away from the 
fishmonger's. A poulterer's is a dead-bodied 
business, with its birds and their lax necks. 
We dislike to see a bird anywhere but in the 
open air, alive and quick. Of all creatures, 
restraint and death become its winged vivacity 
the least. For the same reason we hate 
aviaries. Dog-shops are tolerable. A cook- 
shop does not mingle the agreeable with the 
useful. We hate its panes, with Ham and Beef 
scratched upon them in white letters. An 
ivory-turner's is pleasant, with its red and 
white chessmen, and little big-headed Indians 
on elephants ; so is a toy-shop, with its endless 
delights for children. A coach-maker's is not 
disagreeable, if you can see the painting and 
panels. An umbrella-shop only reminds one 
of a rainy day, unless it is a shop for sticks 
also, which as we have already shown are meri- 
torious articles. The curiosity-shop is some- 
times very amusing, with its mandarins, stuffed 
birds, odd old carved faces, and a variety of 
things as indescribable as bits of dreams. The 
green-grocer carries his recommendation in his 
epithet. The hair-dressers are also interesting 
as far as their hair goes, but not as their heads 
— we mean the heads in their windows. One 
of the shops we like least is an angling reposi- 
tory, with its rod for a sign, and a fish dancing 
in the agonies of death at the end of it. We 
really cannot see what equanimity there is in 
jerking a lacerated carp out of water by the 
jaws, merely because it has not the power of 
making a noise ; for we presume that the most 
philosophic of anglers would hardly delight in 
catching shrieking fish. An optician's is not 
very amusing, unless it has those reflecting- 
glasses in which you see your face run off on 
each side into attenuated width, or upwards and 
downwards in the same manner, in dreary lon- 
gitude. A saddler's is good, because it reminds 
one of horses. A Christian sword-maker's or 
gun-maker's is edifying. A glass-shop is a 
beautiful spectacle ; it reminds one of the 
splendours of a fairy palace. We like a black- 
smith's for the sturdy looks and thumpings of 
the men, the swarthy colour, the fiery sparkles 
and the thunder-breathing throat of the furnace. 
Of other houses of traffic, not common in the 
streets, there is something striking to us in the 



large, well-conditioned horses of the brewers, 
and the rich smoke rolling from out their 
chimneys. We also greatly admire a wharf, 
with its boats, barrels, and packages, and the 
fresh air from the water, not to mention the 
smell of pitch. It carries us at once a hundred 
miles over the water. For similar reasons, the 
crabbedest old lane has its merits in our eyes, 
if there is a sail-maker's in it, or a boat-builder's 
and water at the end. How used old Roberts of 
Lambeth to gratify the aspiring modesty of our 
school-coats, when he welcomed us down to his 
wherries and captains on a holiday, and said 
" Blue against Black at any time," meaning 
the Westminster boys ! And the colleges will 
ratify his praise, taking into consideration the 
difference of the numbers that go there from 
either cloisters. But of all shops in the streets 
a print-seller's pleases us the most. We would 
rather pay a shilling to Mr. Colnaghi, Mr. 
Molteno, or Messieurs Moon and Boys, to look 
at their windows on one of their best-furnished 
days, than we would for many an exhibition. 
We can see fine engravings there, translations 
from Raphael and Titian, which are newer 
than hundreds of originals. We do not despise 
a pastry-cook's, though we would rather not eat 
tarts and puffs before the half-averted face of 
the prettiest of accountants, especially with a 
beggar watching and praying all the while at 
the door. We need not expatiate on the 
beauties of a florist's, where you see un- 
withering leaves, and roses made immortal. 
A dress warehouse is sometimes really worth 
stopping at, for its flowered draperies and richly 
coloured shawls. But one's pleasure is apt to 
be disturbed (ye powers of gallantry ! bear 
witness to the unwilling pen that writes it) by 
the fair faces that come forth, and the half- 
polite, half-execrating expression of the trades- 
man that bows them out ; for here takes place 
the chief enjoyment of the mystery yclept shop- 
ping ; and here, while some ladies give the 
smallest trouble unwillingly, others have an 
infinity of things turned over, for the mere pur- 
pose of wasting their own time and the shopman's . 
We have read of a choice of a wife by cheese. 
It is difficult to speak of preference in such 
matters, and all such single modes of trial must 
be something equivocal ; but we must say, 
that of all modes of the kind, we should desire 
no better way of seeing what ladies we admired 
most, and whom least, than by witnessing this 
trial of them at a linen-draper's counter. 



XL. 



-A NEARER VIEW OF SOME OF 
THE SHOPS. 



In the general glance that we have taken 
at shops, we found ourselves unwillingly com- 
pelled to pass some of them too quickly. It 
is the object therefore of the present article 
to enter into those more attractive thresholds, 



82 



THE INDICATOR. 



and look a little about us. We imagine a fine 
day ; time, about noon ; scene, any good 
brilliant street. The ladies are abroad in 
white and green ; the beaux lounging, con- 
scious of their waists and neckcloths ; the 
busy pushing onward, conscious of their bills ; 
the dogs and coaches — but we must reserve 
this out-of-door view of the streets for a sepa- 
rate article. 

To begin then, where our shopping expe- 
rience began, with the toy-shop : 

Visions of glory, spare our aching sight ! 

Ye just-breech 'd ages, crowd not on our soul ! 

We still seem to have a lively sense of the 
smell of that gorgeous red paint, which was 
on the handle of our first wooden sword ! 
The pewter guard also — how beautifully 
fretted and like silver did it look ! How did 
we hang it round our shoulder by the proud 
belt of an old ribbon ; — then feel it well sus- 
pended ; then draw it out of the sheath, eager 
to cut down four savage men for ill-using ditto 
of damsels ! An old muff made an excellent 
grenadier's cap ; or one's hat and feather, 
with the assistance of three surreptitious large 
pins, became fiercely modern and military. 
There it is, in that corner of the window — 
the same identical sword, to all appearance, 
which kept us awake the first night behind 
our pillow. We still feel ourselves little boys, 
while standing in this shop ; and for that 
matter, so we do on other occasions. A field 
has as much merit in our eyes, and ginger- 
bread almost as much in our mouths, as at that 
daisy-plucking and cake-eating period of life. 
There is the trigger-rattling gun, fine of its 
kind, but not so complete a thing as the 
sword. Its memories are not so ancient : for 
Alexander or St. George did not fight with a 
musket. Neither is it so true a thing ; it is 
not "like life." The trigger is too much like 
that of a cross-bow ; and the pea which it 
shoots, however hard, produces even to the 
imaginative faculties of boyhood a humiliating 
flash of the mock-heroic. It is difficult to 
fancy a dragon killed with a pea : but the 
shape and appurtenances of the sword being 
genuine, the whole sentiment of massacre is 
as much in its wooden blade, as if it were 
steel of Damascus. The drum is still more 
real, though not so heroic. — In the corner 
opposite are battle-doors and shuttle-cocks, 
which have their maturer beauties ; balls, 
which possess the additional zest of the dan- 
ger of breaking people's windows; — ropes, 
good for swinging and skipping, especially the 
long ones which others turn for you, while 
you run in a masterly manner up and down, 
or skip in one spot with an easy and endless 
exactitude of toe, looking alternately at their 
conscious faces ; — blood-allies, with which the 
possessor of a crisp finger and thumb-knuckle 
causes the smitten marbles to vanish out of 



the ring ; kites, which must appear to more 
vital birds a ghastly kind of fowl, with their 
grim long white faces, no bodies, and endless 
tails ; — cricket-bats, manly to handle ; — trap- 
bats, a genteel inferiority ; — swimming-corks, 
despicable ; — horses on wheels, an imposition 
on the infant public ; — rocking horses, too 
much like Pegasus, ardent yet never getting 
on ; — Dutch toys, so like life, that they ought 
to be better ; — Jacob's ladders, flapping down 
one over another their tintinnabulary shut- 
ters ; — dissected maps, from which the infant 
statesmen may learn how to dovetail provinces 
and kingdoms ; — paper posture-makers, who 
hitch up their knees against their shoulder- 
blades, and dangle their legs like an opera 
dancer ; — Lilliputian plates, dishes, and other 
household utensils, in which a grand dinner is 
served up out of half an apple ; — boxes of 
paints, to colour engravings with, always 
beyond the outline ; — ditto of bricks, a very 
sensible and lasting toy, which we except 
from a grudge we have against the gravity 
of infant geometricks ; — whips, very useful 
for cutting people's eyes unawares ; — hoops, 
one of the most ancient as well as excellent of 
toys ; — sheets of pictures, from A apple-pie 
up to farming, military, and zoological exhibi- 
tions, always taking care that the Fly is as 
large as the Elephant, and the letter X exclu- 
sively appropriated to Xerxes ; — musical deal- 
boxes, rather complaining than sweet, and 
more like a peal of bodkins than bells ; — 
penny trumpets, awful at Bartlemy-tide ; — 
Jew's harps, that thrill and breathe between 
the lips like a metal tongue ; — carts — carriages 
— hobby-horses, upon which the infant eques- 
trian prances about proudly on his own feet ; 
— in short, not to go through the whole repre- 
sentative body of existence — dolls, which are 
so dear to the maternal instincts of little girls. 
We protest, however, against that abuse of 
them, which makes them full-dressed young 
ladies in body, while they remain infant in 
face ; especially when they are of frail wax. 
It is cultivating finery instead of affection. 
We prefer good honest plump limbs of cotton 
and saw-dust, dressed in baby-linen ; or even 
our ancient young friends, with their staring 
dotted eyes ; red varnished faces, triangular 
noses, and Rosinante wooden limbs — not, it 
must be confessed, excessively shapely or 
feminine, but the reverse of fragile beauty, 
and prepared against all disasters. 

The next step is to the Pastry-cook's, where 
the plain bun is still the pleasantest thing in our 
eyes, from its respectability in those . of child- 
hood. The pastry, less patronised by judicious 
mothers, is only so much elegant indigestion : 
yet it is not easy to forget the pleasure of 
nibbling away the crust all round a raspberry 
or currant tart, in order to enjoy the three or 
four delicious semicircular bites at the fruity 
plenitude remaining. There is a custard with 



A NEARER VIEW OF SOME OF THE SHOPS. 



83 



a wall of paste round it, which provokes a 
siege of this kind ; and the cheese-cake has its 
amenities of approach. The acid flavour is 
a relief to the mawkishness of the biffin or 
pressed baked apple, and an addition to the 
glib and quivering lightness of the jelly. Twelfth 
Cake, which when cut looks like the side of a 
rich pit of earth covered with snow, is pleasant 
from warmer associations. Confectionary does 
not seem in the same request as of old ; its 
paint has hurt its reputation. Yet the school- 
boy has still much to say for its humbler 
suavities. Kisses are very amiable and alle- 
gorical. Eight or ten of them, judiciously 
wrapped up in pieces of letter-paper, have 
saved many a loving heart the trouble of a less 
eloquent billet-doux. Candied citron we look 
upon to be the very acme and atticism of con- 
fectionary grace. Preserves are too much of 
a good thing, with the exception of the jams 
that retain their fruit-skins. " Jam satis." 
They qualify the cloying. Yet marmalade 
must not be passed over in these times, when 
it has been raised to the dignity of the peerage. 
The other day there was a Duke of Marmalade 
in Hayti, and a Count of Lemonade, — so called, 
from places in which those eminent relishes 
are manufactured. After all, we must own 
that there is but one thing for which we care 
much at a pastry-cook's, except our old 
acquaintance the bun ; especially as we can 
take up that, and go on. It is an ice. Fancy 
a very hot day ; the blinds down ; the loungers 
unusually languid ; the pavement burning one's 
feet ; the sun, with a strong outline in the 
street, baking one whole side of it like a brick- 
kiln ; so that everybody is crowding on the 
other, except a man going to intercept a 
creditor bound for the Continent. Then think 
of a heaped-up ice, brought upon a salver with 
a spoon. What statesman, of any warmth of 
imagination, would not pardon the Neapolitans 
in summer, for an insurrection on account of 
the want of ice ? Think of the first sidelong 
dip of the spoon in it, bringing away a well- 
sliced lump ; then of the sweet wintry refresh- 
ment, that goes lengthening down one's throat ; 
and lastly, of the sense of power and satis- 
faction resulting from having had the ice. 

Not heaven itself can do away that slice ; 

But what has heen, has been ; and I have had my ice. 

We unaccountably omitted two excellent 
shops last week, — the fruiterer's and the 
sculptor's. There is great beauty as well as 
agreeableness in a well-disposed fruiterer's 
window. Here are the round piled-up oranges, 
deepening almost into red, and heavy with 
juice ; the apple with its brown red cheek, as 
if it had slept in the sun ; the pear, swelling 
downwards ; thronging grapes, like so many 
tight little bags of wine ; the peach, whose 
handsome leathern coat strips off so finely ; 
the pearly or ruby-like currants, heaped in 



light long baskets ; the red little mouthful of 
strawberries ; the larger purple ones of plums ; 
cherries, whose old comparison with lips is 
better than anything new ; mulberries, dark 
and rich with juice, fit to grow over what 
Homer calls the deep black- watered fountains ; 
the swelling pomp of melons ; the rough in- 
exorable-looking cocoa-nut, milky at heart ; 
the elaborate elegance of walnuts ; the quaint 
cashoo-nut ; almonds, figs, raisins, tamarinds, 
green leaves, — in short, 

Whatever Earth, all-bearing mother, yields 
In India East or West, or middle shore 
In Pontus or the Punick coast, or where 
Alcinous reigned, fruit of all kinds, in coat 
Rough, or smooth rind, or bearded husk, or shell. 

Milton. 

There is something of more refined service 
in waiting upon a lady in a fruit-shop, than in 
a pastry-cook's. The eating of tarts, as Sir 
Walter Scott handsomely saith in his Life of 
Dryden (who used to enjoy them, it seems, in 
company with " Madam Reeves "), is " no in- 
elegant pleasure j" but there is something still 
more graceful and suitable in the choosing of 
the natural fruit, with its rosy lips and red 
cheeks. A white hand looks better on a basket 
of plums, than in the doubtful touching of 
syrupy and sophisticated pastry. There is less 
of the kitchen about the fair visitor. She is 
more Pomona-like, native, and to the purpose. 
We help her, as we would a local deity. 

Here be grapes whose lusty blood 

Is the learned poets good, 

Sweeter yet did never crown 

The head of Bacchus ; — nuts more brown 

Than the squirrels' teeth that crack them ; 

Deign, O fairest fair, to take them. 

For these black ey'd Driope 

Hath often times commanded me, 

With my clasped knee to climb ; 

See how well the lusty time 

Hath deckt their rising cheeks in red, 

Such as on your lips is spread. 

Here be berries for a Queen, 

Some be red, some be green ; 

These are of that luscious meat, 

The great God Pan himself doth eat. 

All these, and what the woods can yield, 

The hanging mountain or the field, 

I freely offer, and ere long 

Will bring you more, more sweet and strong. 

Till when humbly leave I take, 

Lest the great Pan do awake, 

That sleeping lies in a deep glade, 

Under a broad beech's shade. 

Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess. 

How the poets double every delight for us, 
with their imagination and their music ! 

In the windows of some of the sculptors' 
shops, artificial fruit may be seen. It is a 
better thing to put upon a mantel-piece than 
many articles of greater fashion ; but it gives 
an abominable sensation to one's imaginary 
teeth. The incautious epicure who plunges 
his teeth into "a painted snow-ball" in Italy 
(see Brydone's Tour in Sicily and Malta), can 



84 



THE INDICATOR. 



hardly receive so jarring a balk to his gums, 
as the bare apprehension of a bite at a stone 
peach ; but the farther you go in a sculptor's 
shop the better. Many persons are not aware 
that there are show-rooms in these places, 
which are well worth getting a sight of by 
some small purchase. For the best plaster 
casts the Italian shops, such as Papera's in 
Marylebone-street, Golden-square, and Sarti's 
in Greek-street, are the best. Of all the shop- 
pleasures that are " not inelegant," an hour or 
two passed in a place of this kind is surely one 
of the most polite. Here are the gods and 
heroes of old, and the more beneficent philoso- 
phers, ancient and modern. You are looked 
upon, as you walk among them, by the pater- 
nal majesty of Jupiter, the force and decision 
of Minerva, the still more arresting gentleness 
of Venus, the budding compactness of Hebe, 
the breathing inspiration of Apollo. Here 
the Celestial Venus, naked in heart and body, 
ties up her locks, her drapery hanging upon 
her lower limbs. Here the Belvidere Apollo, 
breathing forth his triumphant disdain, follows 
with an earnest eye the shaft that has killed 
the serpent. Here the Graces, linked in an 
affectionate group, meet you in the naked sin- 
cerity of their innocence and generosity, their 
hands "open as day," and two advancing 
for one receding. Here Hercules, like the 
building of a man, looks down from his prop- 
ping club, as if half disdaining even that repose. 
There Mercury, with his light limbs, seems just 
to touch the ground, ready to give a start with 
his foot and be off again. Bacchus, with his riper 
cheek, and his thicker hanging locks, appears 
to be eyeing one of his nymphs. The Vatican 
Apollo near him, leans upon the stump of a tree, 
the hand which hangs upon it holding a bit of 
his lyre, the other arm thrown up over his head, 
as if he felt the air upon his body, and heard 
it singing through the strings. In a corner on 
another side, is the Crouching Venus of John 
of Bologna, shrinking just before she steps into 
the bath. The Dancing Faun is not far off, 
with his animal spirits, and the Piping Faun, 
sedater because he possesses an art more ac- 
complished. Among the other divinities, we 



look up with veneration to old Homer's head, 
resembling an earthly Jupiter. Plato beholds 
us with a bland dignity — a beauty unimpairable 
by years. How different from the brute im- 
pulse of Mars, the bloated self-will of Nero, 
or the dull and literal effeminacy of some of the 
other emperors ! There is a sort of presence 
in sculpture, more than in any other representa- 
tions of art. It is curious to see how instinc- 
tively people will fall into this sentiment when 
they come into a place with busts and statues 
in it, however common. They hush, as if the 
images could hear them. In our boyhood, 
some of our most delightful holidays were 
spent in the gallery of the late Mr. "West, in 
Newman-street. It runs a good way back 
from the street, crossing a small garden, 
and opening into loftier rooms on the other 
side of it. We remember how the world used 
to seem shut out from us the moment the 
street-door was closed, and we began stepping 
down those long carpeted aisles of pictures, 
with statues in the angles where they turned. 
We had observed everybody walk down them 
in this way, like the mild possessor of the man- 
sion, and we went so likewise. We have walked 
down with him at night to his painting-room, 
as he went in his white flannel gown, with a 
lamp in his hand, which shot a lustrous twi- 
light upon the pictured walls in passing ; and 
everything looked so quiet and graceful, that 
we should have thought it sacrilege to hear a 
sound beyond the light tread of his footsteps. 
But it was the statues that impressed us still 
more than the pictures. It seemed as if Venus 
and Apollo waited our turning at the corners; 
and there they were, always the same, placid 
and intuitive, more human and bodily than the 
paintings, yet too divine to be over real. It is 
to that house with the gallery in question, and 
the little green plot of ground, surrounded 
with an arcade and busts, that we owe the 
greatest part of our love for what is Italian 
and belongs to the fine arts. And if this is a 
piece of private history, with which the readers 
have little to do, they will excuse it for the 
sake of the greatest of all excuse, which is 
Love. 



END OP PART I. 



THE 



INDICATOR, 



THE COMPANION; 



A MISCELLANY FOR THE FIELDS AND THE FIRE-SIDE. 



PART II. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. 

XL. 
XLI. 
XLIL 
XLIH. 
XLIV. 
XLV. 
XLVI. 

XLvn. 
XLvni. 

XLIX. 
L. 
LI, 

Ln. 
Lin. 

LIV. 
LV. 
LVI. 

lvh. 
lvhi. 

LIX. 

LX. 

LXI. 

LXII. 

Lxm. 



PAGE 

A WORD OR TWO MORE ON STICKS .1 

THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPOCRATES . 2 

THE ITALIAN GIRL 4 

A "NOW" 7 

THE HONOURABLE MR. ROBERT BOYLE 8 

SUPERFINE BREEDING 9 

SHAKING HANDS 10 

ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF LAUREL FROM VAUCLUSE . ... ib. 

COACHES . l] 

REMARKS UPON ANDREA DE BASSO'S ODE TO A DEAD BODY . . . 19 

THOUGHTS AND GUESSES ON HUMAN NATURE 21 

THE HAMADRYAD 24 

THE NURTURE OF TRIPTOLEMUS 25 

ON COMMENDATORY VERSES 28 

A WORD UPON INDEXES 31 

AN OLD SCHOOL-BOOK 32 

OF DREAMS 33 

A HUMAN ANIMAL, AND THE OTHER EXTREME 37 

RETURN OF AUTUMN 41 

THE MAID-SERVANT ib. 

THE OLD LADY ... 43 

PULCI . . 44 

MY BOOKS 49 

BUTTERFLIES, <Sic 55 



iv CONTENTS. 



THE COMPANION. 

- * 

CHAP. PASS 

I. AN EARTH UPON HEAVEN . 61 

II. BAD WEATHER 63 

III. FINE DAYS IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 64 

IV. WALKS HOME BY NIGHT IN BAD WEATHER— WATCHMEN . . . . 65 
V. SECRET OF SOME EXISTING FASHIONS 67 

VI. RAIN OUT OF A CLEAR SKY 68 

VH. THE MOUNTAIN OF THE TWO LOVERS 69 

Vni. THE TRUE STORY OF VERTUMNUS AND POMONA . 70 

IX. ON THE GRACES AND ANXIETIES OF PIG-DRIVING . ... 76 

X. PANTOMIMES 76 

XL CRUELTY TO CHILDREN ,77 

XII. HOUSES ON FIRE 79 

XHI. A BATTLE OF ANTS.^-DESIRABLENESS OF DRAWING A DISTINCTION BE- 
TWEEN POWERS COMMON TO OTHER ANIMALS, AND THOSE PECULIAR 
TO MAN . . ib. 

XIV. A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM 84 



THE INDICATOR 



There is a bird in the interior of Africa, whose habits would rather seem to belong to the interior of Fairy-land : 
but they have been well authenticated. It indicates to honey-hunters where the nests of wild bees are to be 
found. It calls them with a cheerful cry, which they answer ; and on finding itself recognized, flies and hovers 
over a hollow tree containing the honey. While they are occupied in collecting it, the bird goes to a little distance, 
where he observes all that passes ; and the hunters, when they have helped themselves, take care to leave him 
his portion of the food.— This is the Cuculus Indicator of Linnams, otherwise called the Moroc, Bee Cuckoo, or 
Honey Bird. 

There he, arriving, round about doth flie, 

And takes survey with busie, curious eye : 

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.— Spenser. 



XL.- 



-A WORD OR TWO MORE ON 
STICKS. 



A correspondent, writing to us on this 
subject, says : — " In my day I have indulged 
an extravagant fancy for canes and sticks ; 
but, like the children of the fashionable world, 
I have, in running the round, grown tired of 
all my favourites, except one of a plain and 
useful sort. Conceive my mortification in 
finding this my last prop not included in your 
catalogue of sticks most in use ; especially since 
it has become, among us men of sticks, the 
description most approved. The present day, 
which is one of mimicry, boasts scarcely any 
protection except in the very stick I allude to ; 
and yet, because it is so unpresuming in its 
appearance, and so cheap, the gentlemen ' of a 
day' will not condescend to use it. We, Sir, 
who make a stick our constant companion (not- 
withstanding our motives may be misunder- 
stood), value the tough, the useful, the highly 
picturesque ' Ash Plant.' Its still and gentle- 
manly colour ; its peculiar property of bending 
round the shoulders of a man, without breaking 
(in the event of our using it that way) ; the 
economy of the thing, as economy is the order 
of the day (at least in minor concerns) ; its being 
the best substitute for the old-fashioned horse- 
whip in a morning-ride, and now so generally 
used in lieu of the long hunting-whip in the 
sports of the chase ; answering every purpose 
for gates, &c, without offering any temptation 
to do the work of a whipper-in ; — all this, and 
much more, might be said of the neglected 
Ground Ash." 

[PART II.] 



We must cry mercy on the estimable stick 
here referred to, and indeed on several other 
sorts of wood, unjustly omitted in our former 
article. We also neglected to notice those in- 
genious and pregnant walking-sticks, which 
contain swords, inkstands, garden-seats, &c. 
and sometimes surprise us with playing a tune. 
As the ancient poets wrote stories of gods 
visiting people in human shapes, in order to 
teach a considerate behaviour to strangers ; so 
an abstract regard ought to be shown to all 
sticks, inasmuch as the irreverent spectator 
may not know what sort of staff he is en- 
countering. If he does not take care, a man 
may beat him and "write him down an ass" 
with the same accomplished implement ; or sit 
down upon it before his face, where there is no 
I chair to be had ; or follow up his chastisement 
with a victorious tune on the flute. As to the 
ash, to which we would do especial honour, for 
the sake of our injured, yet at the same time 
polite and forgiving, Correspondent, we have 
the satisfaction of stating that it hath been re- 
puted the very next wood, in point of utility, 
to the oak ; and hath been famous, time im- 
memorial, for its stafiian qualities. Infinite are 
the spears with which it has supplied the war- 
like, the sticks it has put into the hands of a 
less sanguinary courage, the poles it has 
furnished for hops, vines, &c. and the arbours 
which it has run up for lovers. The Greek 
name for it was Melia, or the Honied ; from a 
juice or manna which it drops, and which has 
been much used in medicine and dyeing. There 
are, or were, about forty years back, when 



THE INDICATOR. 



Count Ginnani wrote his History of the Ravenna 
Pine Forest, large ash woods in Tuscany, which 
used to be tapped for those purposes. Virgil 
calls it the handsomest tree in the forest ; 
Chaucer, " the hardie ashe ;" and Spenser, " the 
ash for nothing ill." The ground-ash flourishes 
the better, the more it is cut and slashed ; — a 
sort of improvement, which it sometimes be- 
stows in return upon humankind. 



XLL— THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPO- 
CRATES. 

In the time of the Norman reign in Sicily, a 
vessel bound from that island for Smyrna was 
driven by a westerly wind upon the island of 
Cos. The crew did not know where they were, 
though they had often visited the island ; for 
the trading towns lay in other quarters, and 
they saw nothing before them but woods and 
solitudes. They found however a comfortable 
harbour ; and the wind having fallen in the 
night, they went on shore next morning for 
water. The country proved as solitary as they 
thought it ; which was the more extraordinary, 
inasmuch as it was very luxuriant, full of wild- 
figs and grapes, with a rich uneven ground, 
and stocked with goats and other animals, who 
fled whenever they appeared. The bees were 
remarkably numerous ; so that the wild honey, 
fruits, and delicious water, especially one 
spring which fell into a beautiful marble 
basin, made them more and more wonder, at 
every step, that they could see no human in- 
habitants. 

Thus idling about and wondering, stretching 
themselves now and then among the wild 
thyme and grass, and now getting up to look 
at some specially fertile place which another 
called them to see, and which they thought 
might be turned to fine trading purpose, they 
came upon a mound covered with trees, which 
looked into a flat wide lawn of rank grass, with 
a house at the end of it. They crept nearer 
towards the house along the mound, still con- 
tinuing among the trees, for fear they were 
trespassing at last upon somebody's property. 
It had a large garden wall at the back, as 
much covered with ivy as if it had been built 
of it. Fruit-trees looked over the wall with an 
unpruned thickness ; and neither at the back 
nor front of the house were there any signs of 
humanity. It was an ancient marble building, 
where glass was not to be expected in the 
windows ; but it was much dilapidated, and 
the grass grew up over the steps. They 
listened again and again ; but nothing was to 
be heard like a sound of men ; nor scarcely of 
anything else. There was an intense noon- 
day silence. Only the hares made a rustling 
noise as they ran about the long hiding grass. 
The house looked like the tomb of human 
nature, amidst the vitality of earth. 



" Did you see ?" said one of the crew, turning 
pale, and hastening to go. "See what ?" said 
the others. "What looked out of window." 
They all turned their faces towards the house, 
but saw nothing. Upon this they laughed at 
their companion, who persisted however with 
great earnestness, and with great reluctance 
at stopping, to say that he saw a strange 
hideous kind of face look out of window. 
" Let us go, Sir," said he, to the Captain ; — 
" for I tell ye what : I know this place now : 
and you, Signor Gualtier," continued he, 
turning to a young man, " may now follow that 
adventure I have often heard you wish to be 
engaged in." The crew turned pale, and 
Gualtier among them. " Yes," added the man, 
" we are fallen upon the enchanted part of the 
island of Cos, where the daughter of — Hush ! 
Look there !" They turned their faces again, 
and beheld the head of a large serpent looking 
out of window. Its eyes were direct upon 
them ; and stretching out of window, it lifted 
back its head with little sharp jerks like a fowl ; 
and so stood keenly gazing. 

The terrified sailors would have begun to 
depart quicklier than they did, had not fear 
itself made them move slowly. Their legs 
seemed melting from under them. Gualtier 
tried to rally his voice. " They say," said he, 
" it is a gentle creature. The hares that feed 
right in front of the house are a proof of it : — 
let us all stay." The others shook their heads, 
and spoke in whispers, still continuing to de- 
scend the mound as well as they could. " There 
is something unnatural in that very thing," 
said the Captain : " but we will wait for you in 
the vessel, if you stay. We will, by St. Ermo." 
The Captain had not supposed that Gualtier 
would stay an instant ; but seeing him linger 
more than the rest, he added the oath in ques- 
tion, and in the mean time was hastening with 
the others to get away. The truth is, Gualtier 
was, in one respect, more frightened than any 
of them. His legs were more rooted to the 
spot. But the same force of imagination that 
helped to detain him, enabled him to muster 
up courage beyond those who found their will 
more powerful : and in the midst of his terror 
he could not help thinking what a fine adven- 
ture this would be to tell in Salerno, even if he 
did but conceal himself a little, and stay a few 
minutes longer than the rest. The thought, 
however, had hardly come upon him, when it 
was succeeded by a fear still more lively ; and 
he was preparing to follow the others with all 
the expedition he could contrive, when a fierce 
rustling took place in the trees behind him, 
and in an instant the serpent's head was at 
his feet. Gualtier's brain as well as heart 
seemed to sicken, as he thought the monstrous 
object scented him like a bear ; but despair 
coming in aid of a courage naturally fanciful 
and chivalrous, he bent his eyes more steadily, 
and found the huge jaws and fangs not only 



THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPOCRATES. 



3 



abstaining from hurting him, but crouching 
and fawning at his feet like a spaniel. At the 
same time, he called to mind the old legend 
respecting the creature, and, corroborated as 
he now saw it, he ejaculated with good firmness, 
"In the name of God and his saints, what art 
thou ?" 

"Hast thou not heard of me?" answered 
the serpent in a voice whose singular human 
slenderness made it seem the more horrible. 
* I guess who thou art," answered Gualtier ; — 
" the fearful thing in the island of Cos." 

" I am that loathly thing," replied the ser- 
pent ; " once not so." And Gualtier thought 
that its voice trembled sorrowfully. 

The monster told Gualtier that what was 
said of her was true ; that she had been a ser- 
pent hundreds of years, feeling old age and 
renewing her youth at the end of each century ; 
that it was a curse of Diana's which had 
changed her ; and that she was never to resume 
a human form, till somebody was found kind 
and bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. As 
she spoke this word, she raised her crest, and 
sparkled so with her fiery green eyes, dilating 
at the same time the corners of her jaws, that 
the young man thrilled through his very scalp. 
He stept back, with a look of the utmost 
horror and loathing. The creature gave a 
sharp groan inwardly, and after rolling her 
neck franticly on the ground, withdrew a little 
back likewise, and seemed to be looking another 
way. Gualtier heard two or three little sounds 
as of a person weeping piteously, yet trying to 
subdue its voice ; and looking with breathless 
curiosity, he saw the side of the loathly crea- 
ture's face bathed in tears. 

" Why speakest thou, lady," said he, " if lady 
thou art, of the curse of the false goddess Diana, 
who never was, or only a devil. I cannot kiss 
thee," — and he shuddered with a horrible 
shudder, as he spoke, " but I will bless thee in 
the name of the true God, and even mark thee 
with his cross." 

The serpent shook her head mournfully, 
still keeping it turned round. She then faced 
him again, hanging her head in a dreary and 
desponding manner. " Thou knowest not," said 
she, "what I know. Diana both was and 
never was ; and there are many other things 
on earth, which are and yet are not. Thou 
canst not comprehend it, even though thou art 
kind. But the heavens alter not, neither the 
sun nor the strength of nature ; and if thou 
wert kinder, I should be as I once was, happy 
and human. Suffice it, that nothing can change 
me but what I said." 

" Why wert thou changed, thou fearful and 
mysterious thing ?" said Gualtier. 

" Because I denied Diana, as thou dost," 
answered the serpent ; " and it was pronounced 
an awful crime in me, though it is none in 
thee ; and I was to be made a thing loathsome 
in men's eyes. Let me not catch thine eye, I 



beseech thee ; but go thy way and be safe ; 
for I feel a cruel thought coming on me, which 
will shake my innermost soul, though it shall 
not harm thee. But I could make thee suffer 
for the pleasure of seeing thine anguish ; even 
as some tyrants do : and is not that dreadful?" 
And the monster openly shed tears, and sobbed. 

There was something in this mixture of 
avowed cruelty and weeping contradiction to 
it, which made Gualtier remain in spite of 
himself. But fear was still uppermost in his 
mind, when he looked upon the mouth that 
was to be kissed ; and he held fast round a 
tree with one hand, and his sword as fast in 
the other, watching the movements of her neck 
as he conversed. " How did thy father, the 
sage Hippocrates," asked he, " suffer thee to 
come to this ?" " My father," replied she, 
" sage and good as he was, was but a Greek 
mortal ; and the great Virgin was a worshipped 
Goddess. I pray thee, go." She uttered the 
last word in a tone of loud anguish ; but the 
very horror of it made Gualtier hesitate, and 
he said, " How can I know that it is not thy 
destiny to deceive the merciful into this horrible 
kiss, that then and then only thou mayst devour 
them ?" 

But the serpent rose higher at this, and 
looking around loftily, said in a mild and 
majestic tone of voice, " O ye green and 
happy woods, breathing like sleep ! O safe 
and quiet population of these leafy places, 
dying brief deaths ! O sea ! O earth ! O 
heavens, never uttering syllable to man ' Is 
there no way to make better known the mean- 
ing of your gentle silence, of your long basking 
pleasures and brief pains? And must the 
want of what is beautiful and kind from others, 
ever remain different from what is beautiful 
and kind in itself? And must form obscure 
essence ; and human confidence in good from 
within, never be bolder than suspicion of evil 
from without ? O ye large-looking and grand 
benignities of creation, is it that we are atoms 
in a dream ; or that your largeness and benig- 
nity are in those only who see them, and that 
it is for us to hang over ye till we wake you 
into a voice with our kisses ? I yearn to be 
made beautiful by one kind action, and beauty 
itself will not believe me !" 

Gualtier, though not a foolish youth, under- 
stood little or nothing of this mystic apostrophe ; 
but something made him bear in mind, and 
really incline to believe, that it was a trans- 
formed woman speaking to him ; and he was 
making a violent internal effort to conquer his 
repugnance to the kiss, when some hares, 
starting from him as they passed, ran and 
cowered behind the folds of the monster : and 
she stooped her head, and licked them. " By 
Christ," exclaimed he, " whom the wormy 
grave gathered into its arms to save us from 
our corruptions, I will do this thing ; so may 
he have mercy on my soul, whether I live or 



THE INDICATOR. 



die : for the very hares take refuge in her 
shadow." Aud shuddering and shutting his 
eyes, he put his mouth out for her to meet ; 
and he seemed to feel, in his blindness, that 
dreadful mouth approaching ; and he made 
the sign of the cross ; and he murmured in- 
ternally the name of him who cast seven devils 
out of Mary Magdalen, that afterwards anointed 
his feet ; and in the midst of his courageous 
agony, he felt a small mouth, fast and warm 
upon his, and a hand about his neck, and 
another on his left hand ; and opening his eyes, 
he dropped them upon two of the sweetest 
that ever looked into the eye of man. — But 
the hares fled ; for they had loved the serpent, 
but knew not the beautiful human being. 

Great was the fame of Gualtier, not only 
throughout the Grecian islands, but on both 
continents ; and most of all in Sicily, where 
every one of his countrymen thought he had 
had a hand in the enterprise, for being born on 
the same soil. The Captain and his crew 
never came again ; for, alas ! they had gone off 
without waiting as they promised. But Tan- 
cred, Prince of Salerno, came himself with a 
knightly train to see Gualtier ; who lived with 
his lady in the same place, all her past suffer- 
ings appearing as nothing to her before a month 
of love ; and even sorrowful habit had endeared 
it to her. Tancred, and his knights, and 
learned clerks, came in a noble ship, every oar 
having a painted scutcheon over the rowlock ; 
and Gualtier and his lady feasted them nobly, 
and drank to them amidst music in cups of 
Hippocras — that knightly liquor afterwards so 
renowned, which she retained the secret of 
making from her sage father, whose name it 
bore. And when King Tancred, with a gentle 
gravity in the midst of his mirth, expressed a 
hope that the beautiful lady no longer wor- 
shipped Diana, Gualtier said, " No indeed, Sir;" 
and she looked in Gualtier's face, as she sat 
next him, with the sweetest look in the world, 
as who should say, " No indeed : — I worship 
thee and thy kind heart." * 



XLII.— THE ITALIAN GIRL. 
The sun was shining beautifully one summer 
evening, as if he bade sparkling farewell to a 
world which he had made happy. It seemed 
also, by his looks, as if he promised to make 
his appearance again to-morrow; but there 
was at times a deep breathing western wind, 
and dark purple clouds came up here and 
there, like gorgeous waiters at a funeral. The 
children in a village not far from the metropolis 
were playing however on the green, content 

* This story is founded on a tradition still preserved in 
the island of Cos, and repeated in old romances and hooks 
of travels. See Dunlop's History of Fiction, vol. ii., where 
he gives an account of Tirante the White. 



with the brightness of the moment, when they 
saw a female approaching, who gathered them 
about her by the singularity of her dress. It 
was not a very remarkable dress ; but any 
difference from the usual apparel of their 
country-women appeared so to them ; and 
crying out, " A French girl ! A French girl !" 
they ran up to her, and stood looking and 
talking. 

The stranger seated herself upon a bench 
that was fixed between two elms, and for a 
moment leaned her head against one of them, 
as if faint with walking. But she raised it 
speedily, and smiled with complacency on the 
rude urchins. She had a boddice and petticoat 
on of different colours, and a handkerchief tied 
neatly about her head with the point behind. 
On her hands were gloves without fingers ; 
and she wore about her neck a guitar, upon 
the strings of which one of her hands rested. 
The children thought her very handsome. 
Anybody else would also have thought her 
very ill ; but they saw nothing before them but 
a good-natured looking foreigner and a guitar, 
and they asked her to play. " die bei ragazzi!" 
said she, in a soft and almost inaudible voice ; 
— "Che visi lieti!"f and she began to play. 
She tried to sing too, but her voice failed her, 
and she shook her head smilingly, saying 
" Stanca ! stanca !"Z "Sing — do sing," said 
the children ; and nodding her head, she was 
trying to do so, when a set of boys came up 
and joined in the request. " No, no," said one 
of the elder boys, " she is not well. You are 
ill, a'nt you, — Miss ? " added he, laying his hand 
upon hers as if to hinder it. He drew out the 
last word somewhat doubtfully, for her ap- 
pearance perplexed him ; he scarcely knew 
whether to take her for a strolling musician 
or a lady strayed from a sick bed. " Grazie /" 
said she, understanding his look : — " troppo 
stanca : troppo. §" 

By this time the usher came up, and ad- 
dressed her in French ; but she only understood 
a word here and there. He then spoke Latin, 
and she repeated one or two of his words, as if 
they were familiar to her. 

" She is an Italian ! " said he, looking round 
with a good-natured importance ; " for the 
Italian is but a bastard of the Latin." The 
children looked with the more wonder, thinking 
he was speaking of the fair musician. 

" Non dubito" continued the usher, " quin tu 
lectitas poetam ilium celeberrimum, Tassonem ; \\ 
Taxum, I should say properly, but the departure 
from the Italian name is considerable." The 
stranger did not understand a word. 

" I speak of Tasso," said the usher, — " of 
Tasso." 

K Tasso ! Tasso ! " repeated the fair minstrel ; 

t Oh what fine hoys ! What happy faces ! 

% Weary ! Weary ! 

§ Thanks : — too weary ! too weary ! 

|| Douhtless you read that celebrated poet Tasso. 



THE ITALIAN GIRL. 



« oh — conosco — U Tas-so ; " * and she hung with 
an accent of beautiful languor upon the first 
syllable. 

" Yes," returned the worthy scholar, " doubt- 
less your accent may be better. Then of 
course you know those classical lines — 

Intanto Erminia infra 1' ombros?/ pianty 
D' antica selva dal cavallo — what is it ? " 

The stranger repeated the words in a tone 
of fondness, like those of an old friend : — 

Intanto Erminia infra 1' ombrose piante 
D' antica selva dal cavallo e scorta ; 
Ne piu governo il fren la man trenlante, 
E mezza quasi par, tra viva e morta.t 

Our usher's common-place book had supplied 
him with a fortunate passage, for it was a 
favourite one of her country-women. It also 
singularly applied to her situation. There 
was a sort of exquisite mixture of clearness 
in her utterance of these verses, which gave 
some of the children a better idea of French 
than they had had ; for they could not get it 
out of their heads that she must be a French 
girl ; — " Italian-French perhaps," said one of 
them. But her voice trembled as she went on, 
like the hand she spoke of. 

"I have heard my poor cousin Montague 
sing those very lines," said the boy who pre- 
vented her from playing. 

" Montague," repeated the stranger very 
plainly, but turning paler and fainter. She 
put one of her hands in turn upon the boy's 
affectionately, and pointed towards the spot 
where the church was. 

" Yes, yes," cried the boy ; — " why, she knew 
my cousin : — she must have known him in 
Florence." 

"I told you," said the usher, "she was an 
Italian." 

"Help her to my aunt's," continued the 
youth, " she'll understand her : — lean upon 
me, Miss ; " and he repeated the last word 
without his former hesitation. 

Only a few boys followed her to the door, 
the rest having been awed away by the usher. 
As soon as the stranger entered the house and 
saw an elderly lady who received her kindly, 
she exclaimed " La Signora Madre," and fell 
in a swoon at her feet. 

She was taken to bed, and attended with 
the utmost care by her hostess, who would 
not suffer her to talk till she had had a sleep. 
She merely heard enough to find out, that the 
stranger had known her son in Italy ; and she 
was thrown into a painful state of suspicion 
by the poor girl's eyes, which followed her 
about the room till the lady fairly came up 
and closed them. 

* Oh — I know — Tasso, 

t Meantime in the old wood, the palfrey bore 
Erminia deeper into shade and shade ; 
Her trembling hands could hold him in no more, 
And she appeared betwixt alive and dead. 



" Obedient ! obedient ! " said the patient : 
" obedient in everything : only the Signora 
will let me kiss her hand ; " and taking it with 
her own trembling one, she laid her cheek 
upon it, and it staid there till she had dropt 
asleep for weariness. 

Silken rest 



Tie all thy cares up ! 

thought her kind watcher, who was doubly 
thrown upon a recollection of that beautiful 
passage in Beaumont and Fletcher, by the 
suspicion she had of the cause of the girl's 
visit. "And yet," thought she, turning her 
eyes with a thin tear in them towards the 
church spire, " he was an excellent boy* — the 
boy of my heart." 

When the stranger woke, the secret was 
explained : and if the mind of her hostess was 
relieved, it was only the more touched with 
pity, and indeed moved with respect and 
admiration. The dying girl (for she evidently 
was dying, and happy at the thought of it) 
was the niece of an humble tradesman in 
Florence, at whose house young Montague, 
who was a gentleman of small fortune, had 
lodged and fallen sick during his travels. She 
was a lively, good-natured girl, whom he used 
to hear coquetting and playing the guitar with 
her neighbours ; and it was greatly on this 
account, that her considerate and hushing 
gravity struck him whenever she entered his 
room. One day he heard no more coquetting, 
nor even the guitar. He asked the reason, 
when she came to give him some drink ; and 
she said she had heard him mention some 
noise that disturbed him. 

" But you do not call your voice and your 
music a noise," said he, "do you, Rosaura ? 
I hope not, for I had expected it would give 
me strength to get rid of this fever and reach 
home." 

Rosaura turned pale, and let the patient into 
a secret ; but what surprised and delighted 
him was, that she played her guitar nearly as 
often as before, and sang too, only less sprightly 
airs. 

" You get better and better, Signor," said 
she, " every day, and your mother will see 
you and be happy. I hope you will tell her 
what a good doctor you had." 

" The best in the world," cried he ; and as 
he sat up in bed, he put his arm round her 
waist and kissed her. 

" Pardon me, Signora," said the poor girl to 
her hostess ; " but I felt that arm round my 
waist for a week after : ay, almost as much 
as if it had been there." 

"And Charles felt that you did," thought 
his mother ; " for he never told me the story." 

" He begged my pardon," continued she, " as 
I was hastening out of the room, and hoped I 
should not construe his warmth into imperti- 
nence. And to hear him talk so to me, who 



THE INDICATOR. 



used to fear what he might think of myself ; 
it made me stand in the passage, and lean my 
head against the wall, and weep such bitter, 
and yet such sweet tears ! — But he did not 
hear them. No, Madam, he did not know, 
indeed, how much I — how much I — " 

" Loved him, child," interrupted Mrs. Mon- 
tague ; "you have a right to say so, and I 
wish he had. been alive to say as much to you 
himself." 

" Oh, good God ! " said the dying girl, her 
tears flowing away, " this is too great a hap- 
piness for me, to hear his own mother talking 
so." And again she lays her weak head upon 
the lady's hand. 

The latter would have persuaded her to 
sleep again ; but she said she could not for 
joy : " for I'll tell you, Madam," continued 
she, " I do not believe you will think it 
foolish, for something very grave at my heart 
tells me it is not so ; but I have had a long 
thought," (and her voice and look grew more 
exalted as she spoke,) " which has supported 
me through much toil and many disagreeable 
things to this country and this place ; and I 
will tell you what it is, and how it came into 
my mind. I received this letter from your 
son." 

Here she drew out a paper which, though 
carefully wrapped up in several others, was 
much worn at the sides. It was dated from 
the village, and ran thus : — 

"'This comes from the Englishman whom 
Rosaura nursed so kindly at Florence. She 
will be sorry to hear that her kindness was in 
vain, for he is dying ; and he sometimes fears 
that her sorrow will be greater than he could 
wish it to be. But marry one of your kind 
countrymen, my good girl ; for all must love 
Rosaura who know her. If it shall be my lot 
ever to meet her in heaven, I will thank her 
as a blessed tongue only can.' 

"As soon as I read this letter, Madam," 
continues Rosaura, "and what he said about 
heaven, it flashed into my head, that though I 
did not deserve him on earth, I might, perhaps, 
by trying and patience, deserve to be joined 
with him in heaven, where there is no distinc- 
tion of persons. My uncle was pleased to see 
me become a religious pilgrim ; but he knew 
as little of the world as I, and I found that I 
could earn my way to England better, and 
quite as religiously, by playing my guitar, 
which was also more independent ; and I had 
often heard your son talk of independence and 
freedom, and commend me for doing what he 
was pleased to call so much kindness to others. 
So I played my guitar from Florence all the 
way to England, and all that I earned by it I 
gave away to the poor, keeping enough to pro- 
cure me lodging. I lived on bread and water, 
and used to weep happy tears over it, because 
I looked up to heaven and thought he might 
see me, I have sometimes, though not often, 



met with small insults ; but if ever they 
threatened to grow greater, I begged the 
people to desist in the kindest way I could, 
even smiling, and saying I would please them 
if I had the heart ; which might be wrong, 
but it seemed as if deep thoughts told me to 
say so ; and they used to look astonished, and 
left off ; which made me the more hope that 
St. Philip and the Holy Virgin did not think 
ill of my endeavours. So playing, and giving 
alms in this manner, I arrived in the neigh- 
bourhood of your beloved village, where I fell 
sick for a while, and was very kindly treated 
in an out-house ; though the people, I thought, 
seemed to look strange and afraid on this cru- 
cifix — (though your son never did), — though 
he taught me to think kindly of everybody, 
and hope the best, and leave everything, except 
our own endeavours, to Heaven. I fell sick, 
Madam, because I found for certain that the 
Signor Montague was dead, albeit I had no 
hope that he was alive." 

She stopped awhile for breath, for she was 
growing weaker and weaker, and her hostess 
would fain have had her keep silence ; but she 
pressed her hand as well as she might, and 
prayed with such a patient panting of voice to 
be allowed to go on, that she was. She smiled 
thankfully and resumed : — 

" So when — so when I got my strength a I i 
little again, I walked on and came to the 
beloved viDage, and I saw the beautiful white 
church spire in the trees ; and then I knew 
where his body slept, and I thought some kind 
person would help me to die, with my face 
looking towards the church as it now does ; 
and death is upon me, even now : but lift me a 
little higher on the pillows, dear lady, that I 
may see the green ground of the hill." 

She was raised up as she wished, and after 
looking awhile with a placid feebleness at the 
hill, said in a very low voice, " Say one prayer 
for me, dear lady ; and if it be not too proud in 
me, call me in it your daughter." 

The mother of her beloved summoned up a 
grave and earnest voice, as well as she might, 
and knelt and said, " Heavenly Father of us 
all, who in the midst of thy manifold and 
merciful bounties bringest us into strong 
passes of anguish, which nevertheless thou en- 
ablest us to go through, look down, we beseech 
thee, upon this thy young and innocent servant, 
the daughter — that might have been — of my 
heart, and enable her spirit to pass through the 
struggling bonds of mortality, and be gathered 
into thy rest with those we love. Do, dear and 
great God, of thy infinite mercy, for we are 
poor weak creatures, both young and old — " 
here her voice melted away into a breathing 
tearfulness ; and after remaining on her knees 
a moment longer, she rose and looked upon the 
bed, and saw that the weary smiling one was 
no more. 



A "NOW." 



7 



XLIII.— A « NOW." 

DESCRIPTIVE OF A HOT DAY. 

Now the rosy- (and lazy-) fingered Aurora, 
issuing from her saffron house, calls up the 
moist vapours to surround her, and goes veiled 
with them as long as she can ; till Phoebus, 
coming forth in his power, looks everything 
out of the sky, and holds sharp uninterrupted 
empire from his throne of beams. Now the 
mower begins to make his sweeping cuts more 
slowly, and resorts oftener to the beer. Now 
the carter sleeps a-top of his load of hay, or 
plods with double slouch of shoulder, looking 
out with eyes winking under his shading hat, 
and with a hitch upward of one side of his 
mouth. Now the little girl at her grand- 
mother's cottage-door watches the coaches that 
go by, with her hand held up over her sunny 
forehead. Now labourers look well resting in 
their white shirts at the doors of rural ale- 
houses. Now an elm is fine there, with a seat 
under it ; and horses drink out of the trough, 
stretching their yearning necks with loosened 
collars ; and the traveller calls for his glass of 
ale, having been without one for more than 
ten minutes ; and his horse stands wincing at 
the flies, giving sharp shivers of his skin, and 
moving to and fro his ineffectual docked tail ; 
and now Miss Betty Wilson, the host's daughter, 
comes streaming forth in a flowered gown and 
ear-rings, carrying with four of her beautiful 
fingers the foaming glass, for which, after the 
traveller has drank it, she receives with an in- 
different eye, looking another way, the lawful 
two-pence. Now grasshoppers " fry," as 
Dry den says. Now cattle stand in water, and 
ducks are envied. Now boots, and shoes, and 
trees by the road-side, are thick with dust ; and 
dogs, rolling in it, after issuing out of the water, 
into which they have been thrown to fetch 
sticks, come scattering horror among the legs 
of the spectators. Now a fellow who finds he has 
three miles further to go in a pair of tight 
shoes, is in a pretty situation. Now rooms 
with the sun upon them become intolerable ; 
and the apothecary's apprentice, with a bitter- 
ness beyond aloes, thinks of the pond he used 
to bathe in at school. Now men with pow- 
dered heads (especially if thick) envy those 
that are unpowdered, and stop to wipe them 
up hill, with countenances that seem to expos- 
tulate with destiny. Now boys assemble round 
the village pump with a ladle to it, and delight 
to make a forbidden splash and get wet through 
the shoes. Now also they make suckers of 
leather, and bathe all day long in rivers and 
ponds, and make mighty fishings for "tittle- 
bats." Now the bee, as he hums along, seems 
to be talking heavily of the heat. Now doors 
and brick- walls are burning to the hand ; and 
a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in 
it, near a brick-field, is a thing not to be thought 



of. Now a green lane, on the contrary, thick- 
set with hedge-row elms, and having the noise 
of a brook " rumbling in pebble-stone," is one 
of the pleasantest things in the world. 

Now, in town, gossips talk more than ever to 
one another, in rooms, in door- ways, and out of 
window, always beginning the conversation 
with saying that the heat is overpowering. Now 
blinds are let down, and doors thrown open, 
and flannel waistcoats left off, and cold meat 
preferred to hot, and wonder expressed why 
tea continues so refreshing, and people delight 
to sliver lettuces into bowls, and apprentices 
water door-ways with tin canisters that lay 
several atoms of dust. Now the water-cart, 
jumbling along the middle of the street, and 
jolting the showers out of its box of water, 
really does something. Now fruiterers' shops 
and dairies look pleasant, and ices are the only 
things to those who can get them. Now ladies 
loiter in baths ; and people make presents of 
flowers ; and wine is put into ice ; and the 
after-dinner lounger recreates his head with 
applications of perfumed water out of long- 
neckea bottles. Now the lounger, who cannot 
resist riding his new horse, feels his boots burn 
him. Now buck-skins are not the lawn of Cos. 
Now jockeys, walking in great-coats to lose 
flesh, curse inwardly. Now five fat people in 
a stage-coach hate the sixth fat one who is 
coming in, and think he has no right to be so 
large. Now clerks in office do nothing but 
drink soda-water and spruce-beer, and read the 
newspaper. Now the old-clothesman drops 
his solitary cry more deeply into the areas on 
the hot and forsaken side of the street ; and 
bakers look vicious ; and cooks are aggravated ; 
and the steam of a tavern-kitchen catches hold 
of us like the breath of Tartarus. Now delicate 
skins are beset with gnats; and boys make 
their sleeping companion start up, with playing 
a burning-glass on his hand ; and blacksmiths 
are super-carbonated ; and cobblers in their 
stalls almost feel a wish to be transplanted ; 
and butter is too easy to spread ; and the dra- 
goons wonder whether the Romans liked their 
helmets ; and old ladies, with their lappets 
unpinned, walk along in a state of dilapidation ; 
and the servant maids are afraid they look vul- 
garly hot ; and the author, who has a plate of 
strawberries brought him, finds that he has 
come to the end of his writing. 

We cannot conclude this article, however, 
without returning thanks, both on our own 
account and on that of our numerous prede- 
cessors, who have left so large a debt of grati- 
tude unpaid, to this very useful and ready 
monosyllable — " Now." We are sure that 
there is not a didactic poet, ancient or modern, 
who, if he possessed a decent share of can- 
dour, would not be happy to own his obliga- 
tions to that masterly conjunction, wdiich pos- 
sesses the very essence of wit, for it has the 
art of bringing the most remote thii'gs toge- 



8 



THE INDICATOR. 



tlier. And its generosity is in proportion to its 
wit, for it always is most profuse of its aid 
where it is most wanted. 

We must enjoy a pleasant passage with the 
reader on the subject of this " eternal Now " 
in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of the Woman- 
Hater. — Upon turning to it, we perceive that 
our illustrious particle does not make quite so 
great a figure as we imagined ; but the whole 
passage is in so analogous a taste, and affords 
such an agreeable specimen of the wit and 
humour with which fine poets could rally the 
common-places of their art, that we cannot 
help proceeding with it. Lazarello, a foolish 
table-hunter, has requested an introduction to 
the Duke of Milan, who has had a fine lam- 
prey presented him. Before the introduction 
takes place, he finds that the Duke has 
given the fish away ; so that his wish to be 
known to him goes with it ; and part of the 
drollery of the passage arises from his uneasi- . 
ness at being detained by the consequences of 
his own request, and his fear lest he should 
be too late for the lamprey elsewhere. 

Count (aside to the Duke). Let me entreat 
your Grace to stay a little, 
To know a gentleman, to whom yourself 
Is much beholding. He hath made the sport 
For your whole court these eight years, on my 
knowledge. 

Duke. His name ? 

Count. Lazarello. 

Duke. I heard of him this morning : — which 
is he? 

Count (aside to Laz.). Lazarello, pluck up 
thy spirits. Thy fortune is now raising. The 
Duke calls for thee, and thou shalt be ac- 
quainted with him. 

Laz. He's going away, and I must of neces- 
sity stay here upon business. 

Count. 'Tis all one : thou shalt know him first. 

Laz. Stay a little. If he should offer to take 
me with him, and by that means I should lose 
that I seek for ! But if he should, I will not 
go with him. 

Count. Lazarello, the Duke stays. Wilt thou 
lose this opportunity ? 

Laz. How must I speak to him ? 

Count. 'Twas well thought of. You must 
not talk to him as you do to an ordinary man, 
honest plain sense ; but you must wind about 
him. For example, if he should ask you what 
o'clock it is, you must not say, " If it please 
your Grace, 'tis nine ; " — but thus ; — " Thrice 
three o'clock, so please my Sovereign ; " — or 
thus : — 

" Look how many Muses there do dwell 
Upon the sweet banks of the learned well, 
Andjustso many strokes theclock hath struck;" 
and so forth. And you must now and then 
enter into a description. 

Laz. I hope I shall do it. 

Count. Come. — May it please your Grace to 
take note of a gentleman, well seen, deeply 



read, and thoroughly grounded in the hidden 
knowledge of all sallets and pot-herbs what- 
soever. 

Duke. I shall desire to know him more in- 
wardly. 

Laz. I kiss the ox-hide of your Grace's foot. 

Count (aside to Laz.). Very well. — Will your 
Grace question him a little. 

Duke. How old are you ? 

Laz. Full eight-and-twenty several almanacks 
Have been compiled, all for several years, 
Since first I drew this breath. Four 'prentice- 



Have I most truly served in this world : 
And eight-and-twenty times hath Phoabus' car 
Run out his yearly course, since 

Duke. I understand you, Sir. 

Lucio. How like an ignorant poet he talks ! 

Duke. You are eight-and-twenty years old ? 
What time of the day do you hold it to be ? 

Laz. About the time that mortals whet their 
knives 
On thresholds, on their shoe-soles, and on stairs. 
Now bread is grating, and the testy cook 
Hath much to do now ; now the tables all 

Duke. 'Tis almost dinner-time ? 

Laz. Your Grace doth apprehend me very 
rightly. 



XLIV.— THE HONOURABLE MR. ROBERT 
BOYLE. 

The celebrated Robert Boyle, the chemist, 
was accounted in his days a sort of perfection 
of a man, especially in all respects intellectual, 
moral, and religious. This excellent person 
was in the habit of moralising upon every- 
thing that he did or suffered ; such as, " Upon 
his manner of giving meat to his dog," — " Upon 
his horse stumbling in a very fair way," — 
" Upon his sitting at ease in a coach that went 
very fast," &c. Among other Reflections, is 
one "Upon a fish's struggling after having 
swallowed the hook." It amounts to this : that 
at the moment when the fish thinks himself 
about to be most happy, the hook "does so 
wound and tear his tender gills, and thereby 
puts him into such restless pain, that no doubt 
he wishes the hook, bait and all, were out of 
his torn jaws again. Thus," says he, " men 
who do what they should not, to obtain any 
sensual desires," &c. &c. Not a thought comes 
over him as to his own part in the business, 
and what he ought to say of himself for tearing 
the jaws and gills to indulge his own appetite 
for excitement. Take also the following : — 
" Fifth Section— Reflection I. Killing a crow 
(out of window) in a hog's trough, and imme- 
diately tracing the ensuing reflection with a 
pen made of one of his quills. — Long and pa- 
tiently did I wait for this unlucky crow, wal- 
lowing in the sluttish trough (whose sides kept 
him a great while out of the reach of my gun), 



SUPERFINE BREEDING. 



and gorging himself with no less greediness 
than the very swinish proprietaries of the 
feast, till at length my no less unexpected 
than fatal shot in a moment struck him down, 
and turning the scene of his delight into that 
of his pangs, made him abruptly alter his note, 
and change his triumphant chaunt into a dis- 
mal and tragic noise. This method is not 
unusual to divine justice towards brawny and 
incorrigible sinners," &c. &c. Thus the crow, 
for eating his dinner, is a rascal worthy to be 
shot by the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle, 
before the latter sits down to his own ; while 
the said Mr. Boyle, instead of contenting 
himself with being a gentleman in search of 
amusement at the expense of birds and fish, is 
a representative of Divine Justice. 

We laugh at this wretched moral pedantry 
now, and deplore the involuntary hard-hearted- 
ness which such mistakes in religion tended 
to produce ; but in how many respects should 
it not make us look about ourselves, and see 
where we fall short of an enlargement of 
thinking ? 



XLV.— SUPERFINE BREEDING. 

Thehe is an anecdote in Aulus Gellius (Noc- 
tes Atticce, lib. 10, cap. vi.) which exhibits, we 
think, one of the highest instances of what 
may be called polite blackguardism, that we 
remember to have read. The fastidiousness, 
self-will, and infinite resentment against a 
multitude of one's fellow-creatures for pre- 
suming to come in contact with our import- 
ance, are truly edifying ; and to complete the 
lesson, this extraordinary specimen of the 
effect of superfine breeding and blood is 
handed down to us in the person of a lady. 
Her words might be thought to have been 
a bad joke ; and bad enough it would have 
been; but the sense that was shown of them 
proves them to have been very gravely re- 
garded. 

Claudia, the daughter of Appius Csecus, in 
coming away from a public spectacle, was 
much pressed and pushed about by the crowd; 
upon which she thus vented her impatience : — 
" What should I have suffered now, and how 
much more should I have been squeezed and 
knocked about, if my brother Publius Claudius 
had not had his ships destroyed in battle, with 
all that heap of men? I should have been 
absolutely jammed to death ! Would to hea- 
ven my brother were alive again, and could go 
with another fleet to Sicily, and be the death 
of this host of people, who plague and pester 
one in this horrid manner * ! " 

* " Quid me nunc factum esset, quantoque arctius pres- 
siusque conflictata cssem, si P. Claudius frater meus 
navali praelio classem navium cum ingenti civium numero 
non perdidisset ? certe quidem majore nimc copia populi 
oppressa intercidissem. Sed utinam, in quit, rcviviscat 



For these words, " so wicked and so uncivic," 
says good old Gellius (tarn improba ac tam in- 
civilia) the iEdiles, Caius Fundanus and Tibe- 
rius Sempronius, got the lady fined in the sum 
of twenty-five thousand pounds brass. There 
is a long account, in Livy, of the speech which 
they made to the people in reply to tfle noble 
families that interceded for her. It is very in- 
dignant. Claudia herself confessed her words, 
and does not appear to have joined in the in- 
tercession. They are not related at such length 
by Livy, as by Aulus Gellius. He merely makes 
her wish that her brother were alive to take 
out another fleet. But he shows his sense of 
the ebullition by calling it a dreadful impreca- 
tion ; and her rage was even more gratuitous, 
according to his account ; for he describes her 
as coming from the shows in a chariot. 

Insolence and want of feeling appear to have 
been hereditary in this Appian family : which 
gives us also a strong sense of their want of 
capacity ; otherwise a disgust at such manners 
must have been generated in some of the 
children. They were famous for opposing 
every popular law, and for having kept the 
commons as long as possible out of any share 
in public honours and government. The vil- 
lain Appius Claudius, whose story has been 
made still more familiar to the public by the 
tragedy of Mr. Knowles, was among its ances- 
tors. Appius Csecus, or the Blind, the father 
of Claudia, though he constructed the cele- 
brated Appian Way and otherwise benefited 
the city, was a very unpopular man, wilful, 
haughty, and lawless. He retained possession 
of the Censorship beyond the limited period. 
It is an instance perhaps of his unpopularity, 
as well as of the superstition of the times, that 
having made a change in one of the priestly 
offices, and become blind some years afterwards, 
the Romans attributed it to the vengeance of 
heaven ; an opinion which Livy repeats with 
great devotion, calling it a warning against in- 
novations in religion. It had no effect, how- 
ever, upon Claudius the brother, whose rashness 
furnished the pious Romans with a similar 
example to point at. Before an engagement 
with the Carthaginians, the Sacred Chickens 
were consulted, and because they would not 
peck and furnish him with a good omen, he 
ordered them to be thrown into the sea. " If 
they won't eat," says he, " let 'em drink." The 
engagement was one of the worst planned 
and the worst fought in the world ; but the 
men were dispirited by the Consul's irreverent 
behaviour to the chickens ; and his impiety 
shared the disgrace with his folly. Livy re- 
presents him as an epitome of all that was 
bad in his family ; proud, stubborn, unmerciful, 
though full of faults himself, and wilful and 
precipitate to a degree of madness. This was 

frater, aliamque classem in Siciliam ducat, atque istam 
multitudinem perditum eat, quae me male nunc miseram 
convexavit." 



10 



THE INDICATOR. 



the battle, of which his sister wished to see a 
repetition. It cost the Romans many ships 
sunk, ninety-three taken, and according to the 
historian, the miraculous loss of eight thousand 
men killed and twenty thousand taken pri- 
soners, while the Carthaginians lost not a ship 



XLVI.— SHAKING HANDS. 

Among the first things which we remember 
noticing in the manners of people, were two 
errors in the custom of shaking hands. Some 
we observed, grasped everybody's hand alike, 
— with an equal fervour of grip. You would 
have thought that Jenkins was the best friend 
they had in the world ; but on succeeding to 
the squeeze, though a slight acquaintance, you 
found it equally flattering to yourself ; and on 
the appearance of somebody else (whose name, 
it turned out, the operator had forgotten,) the 
crush was no less complimentary : — the face 
was as earnest, and beaming the " glad to see 
you " as syllabicai and sincere, and the shake 
as close, as long, and as rejoicing, as if the 
semi-unknown was a friend come home from 
the Deserts. 

On the other hand, there would be a gentle- 
man, now and then, as coy of his hand, as if 
he were a prude, or had a whitlow. It was in 
■vain that your pretensions did not go beyond 
the " civil salute" of the ordinary shake ; or 
that being introduced to him in a friendly 
manner, and expected to shake hands with the 
rest of the company, you could not in decency 
omit his. His fingers, half coming out and 
half retreating, seemed to think that you were 
going to do them a mischief ; and when you 
got hold of them, the whole shake was on your 
side ; the other hand did but proudly or pen- 
sively acquiesce — there was no knowing which; 
you had to sustain it, as you might a lady's, in 
handing her to a seat ; and it was an equal 
perplexity to know whether to shake or to let 
it go. The one seemed a violence done to the 
patient, the other an awkward responsibility 
brought upon yourself. You did not know, 
all the evening, whether you were not an ob- 
ject of dislike to the person ; till, on the party's 
breaking up, you saw him behave like an 
equally ill-used gentleman to all who practised 
the same unthinking civility. 

Both these errors, we think, might as well 
be avoided ; but, of the two, we must say we 
prefer the former. If it does not look so much 
like particular sincerity, it looks more like 
general kindness ; and if those two virtues are 
to be separated (which they assuredly need 
not be, if considered without spleen), the 
world can better afford to dispense with an 
unpleasant truth than a gratuitous humanity. 
Besides, it is more difficult to make sure of the 
one than to practise the other, and kindness 



itself is the best of all truths. As long as we 
are sure of that, we are sure of something, and 
of something pleasant. It is always the best 
end, if not in every instance the most logical 
means. 

This manual shyness is sometimes attributed 
to modesty, but never, we suspect, with justice, 
unless it be that sort of modesty whose fear 
of committing itself is grounded in pride. 
Want of address is a better reason ; but this 
particular instance of it would be grounded in 
the same feeling. It always implies a habit 
either of pride or mistrust. We have met 
with two really kind men who evinced this 
soreness of hand. Neither of them, perhaps, 
thought himself inferior to anybody about him, 
and both had good reason to think highly of 
themselves, but both had been sanguine men 
contradicted in their early hopes. There was 
a plot to meet the hand of one of them with a 
fish-slice, in order to show him the disadvantage 
to which he put his friends by that flat mode 
of salutation ; but the conspirator had not the 
courage to do it. Whether he heard of the 
intention we know not, but shortly afterwards 
he took very kindly to a shake. The other * 
was the only man of a warm set of politicians, 
who remained true to his first hopes of mankind. 
He was impatient at the change in his com- 
panions, and at the folly and inattention of the 
rest ; but though his manner became cold, his 
consistency remained warm, and this gave him 
a right to be as strange as he pleased. 



XL VII. — ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF 
LAUREL FROM VAUCLUSE. 

And this piece of laurel is from Vaucluse ! 
Perhaps Petrarch, perhaps Laura sat under it ! 
This is a true present. What an exquisite, 
dry, old, vital, young-looking, everlasting twig 
it is ! It has been plucked nine months, and 
yet looks as hale and as crisp as if it would last 
ninety years. It shall last, at any rate, as long 
as its owner, and longer,' if care and love can 
preserve it. How beautifully it is turned ! It 
was a happy pull from the tree. Its shape is 
the very line of beauty ; it has berries upon it, 
as if resolved to show us in what fine condition 
the trees are ; while the leaves issue from it, 
and swerve upwards with their elegant points, 
as though they had come from adorning the 
poet's head. Be thou among the best of one's 
keepsakes, thou gentle stem, in deliciis nostris ; 
and may the very maid-servant, who wonders 
to see thy withered beauty in its frame, miss 
her lover the next five weeks, for not having 
the instinct to know that thou must have 
something to do with love ! 

Perhaps Petrarch has felt the old ancestral 
boughs of this branch stretching over his head, 
*The late Mr. Hazlitt. 



COACHES. 



11 



and whispering to him of the name of Laura, 
of his love, and of their future glory ; for all 
these ideas used to be entwined in one. (Ses- 
tina 2, canzone 17, sonetti 162, 163, 164, 207, 
224, &c.) Perhaps it is of the very stock of 
that bough, which he describes as supplying 
his mistress with a leaning-stock, when she 
sat in her favourite bower. 

Giovane donna sotto un verde lauro 
Vidi piu bianca e piu fredda che neve 
Non percossa dal sol molti e molt' anni ; 
E 1 suo parlar, e '1 bel viso, e le chiome, 
Mi piacquer si, ch' i' l'ho a gli occhi miei, 
Ed avro sempre, ov' io sia in poggio o'n riva. 

Part i. eestina 2. 
A youthful lady under a green laurel 
I saw, more fair and colder than white snows 
Veil'd from the sun for many and many a year : 
And her sweet face, and hair, and way of speaking, 
So pleased me, that I have her now before me, 
And shall have ever, whether on hill or lea. 

The laurel seems more appropriate to Pe- 
trarch than to any other poet. He delighted 
to sit under its leaves ; he loved it both for 
itself and for the resemblance of its name to 
that of his mistress ; he wrote of it continually, 
and he was called from out of its shade to be 
crowned with it in the capitol. It is a remark- 
able instance of the fondness with which he 
cherished the united idea of Laura and the 
laurel, that he confesses this fancy to have 
been one of the greatest delights he experienced 
in receiving the crown upon his head. 

It was out of Vaucluse that he was called. 
Vaucluse, Valchiusa, the Shut Valley (from 
which the French, in the modern enthusiasm 
for intellect, gave the name to the department 
in which it lies), is a remarkable spot in the 
old poetical region of Provence, consisting of a 
little deep glen of green meadows, surrounded 
with rocks, and containing the fountain of the 
river Sorgue. Petrarch, when a boy of eight 
or nine years of age, had been struck with its 
beauty, and exclaimed that it was the place of 
all others he should like to live in, better than 
the most splendid cities. He resided there 
afterwards for several years, and composed in 
it the greater part of his poems. Indeed, he 
says in his account of himself, that he either 
wrote or conceived, in that valley, almost every 
work he produced. He lived in a little cottage, 
with a small homestead, on the banks of the 
river. Here he thought to forget his passion 
for Laura, and here he found it stronger than 
ever. We do not well see how it could have 
been otherwise ; for Laura lived no great way 
off, at Chabrieres, and he appears to have seen 
her often in the very place. He paced along 
the river ; he sat under the trees ; he climbed 
the mountains ; but Love, he says, was ever 
by his side, 

Ragionando con meco, ed io con lui. 

He holding talk with me, and I with him. 

We are supposing that all our readers are 
acquainted with Petrarch. Many of them 



doubtless know him intimately. Should any 
of them want an introduction to him, how 
should we speak of him in the gross ? We 
should say, that he was one of the finest gen- 
tlemen and greatest scholars that ever lived ; 
that he was a writer who flourished in Italy in 
the 14th century, at the time when Chaucer 
was young, during the reigns of our Edwards ; 
that he was the greatest light of his age ; that 
although so fine a writer himself, and the 
author of a multitude of works, or rather 
because he was both, he took the greatest pains 
to revive the knowledge of the ancient learning, 
recommending it everywhere, and copying out 
large manuscripts with his own hand ; that 
two great cities, Paris and Rome, contended 
which should have the honour of crowning 
him ; that he was crowned publicly, in the 
Metropolis of the World, with laurel and with 
myrtle ; that he was the friend of Boccaccio, 
the Father of Italian Prose ; and lastly, that 
his greatest renown nevertheless, as well as 
the predominant feelings of his existence, arose 
from the long love he bore for a lady of Avi- 
gnon, the far-famed Laura, whom he fell in love 
with on the 6th of April, 1327, on a Good 
Friday ; whom he rendered illustrious in a 
multitude of sonnets, which have left a sweet 
sound and sentiment in the ear of all after 
lovers ; and who died, still passionately be- 
loved, in the year 1348, on the same day and 
hour on which he first beheld her. Who she 
was, or why their connexion was not closer, 
remains a mystery. But that she was a real 
person, and that in spite of her staid manners 
she did not show an altogether insensible 
countenance to his passion, is clear from his 
long-haunted imagination, from his own re- 
peated accounts — from all that he wrote, uttered, 
and thought. One love, and one poet, sufficed 
to give the whole civilised world a sense of 
delicacy in desire, of the abundant riches to 
be found in one single idea, and of the going 
out of a man's self to dwell in the soul and 
happiness of another, which has served to 
refine the passion for all modern times ; and 
perhaps will do so, as long as love renews the 
world. 



XLVIII.-COACHES. 

According to the opinion commonly enter- 
tained respecting an author's want of riches, 
it may be allowed us to say, that we retain 
from childhood a considerable notion of " a 
ride in a coach." Nor do we hesitate to confess, 
that by coach, we especially mean a hired one ; 
from the equivocal dignity of the post-chaise, 
down to that despised old cast-away, the 
hackney. 

It is true, that the carriage, as it is indiffer- 
ently called (as if nothing less genteel could 
carry any one) is a more decided thing than 



12 



THE INDICATOR. 



the chaise ; it may be swifter even than the 
mail, leaves the stage at a still greater distance 
in every respect, and (forgetting what it may 
come to itself) darts by the poor old lumbering 
hackney with immeasurable contempt. It 
rolls with a prouder ease than any other 
vehicle. It is full of cushions and comfort ; 
elegantly coloured inside and out ; rich, yet 
neat ; light and rapid, yet substantial. The 
horses seem proud to draw it. The fat and 
fair-wigged coachman " lends his sounding 
lash," his arm only in action and that but little, 
his body well set with its own weight. The 
footman, in the pride of his nonchalance, hold- 
ing by the straps behind, and glancing down 
sideways betwixt his cocked-hat and neckcloth, 
stands swinging from east to west upon his 
springy toes. The horses rush along amidst 
their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap 
about them, barking with a princely superfluity 
of noise. The hammer-cloth trembles through 
all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun. 
We, contemptuous of everything less con- 
venient, bow backwards and forwards with a 
certain indifferent air of gentility, infinitely 
predominant. Suddenly, with a happy mixture 
of turbulence and truth, the carriage dashes 
up by the curb-stone to the very point desired, 
and stops with a lordly wilfulness of decision. 
The coachman looks as if nothing had hap- 
pened. The footman is down in an instant ; 
the knocker reverberates into the farthest 
corner of the house ; doors, both carriage and 
house, are open ; — we descend, casting a matter- 
of-course eye at the by-standers ; and the 
moment we touch the pavement, the vehicle, 
as if conscious of what it has carried, and re- 
lieved from the weight of our importance, 
recovers from its sidelong inclination with a 
jerk, tossing and panting, as it were, for 
very breath, like the proud heads of the 
horses. 

All this, it must be owned, is very pretty ; 
but it is also gouty and superfluous. It is too 
convenient, — too exacting, — too exclusive. 
We must get too much for it, and lose too 
much by it. Its plenty, as Ovid says, makes 
us poor. We neither have it in the republic 
of letters, nor would desire it in any less 
Jacobinical state. Horses, as many as you 
please, provided men have enough to eat ; — 
hired coaches, a reasonable number : — but 
health and good-humour at all events. 

Gigs and curricles are things less objection- 
able, because they cannot be so relied upon as 
substitutes for exercise. Our taste in them, 
we must confess, is not genuine. How shall 
we own it ? We like to be driven, instead of 
drive ; — to read or look about us, instead of 
keeping watch on a horse's head. We have no 
relish even for vehicles of this description that 
are not safe. Danger is a good thing for giving 
a fillip to a man's ideas ; but even danger, to 
us, must come recommended by something 



useful. We have no ambition to have Tandem 
written on our tombstone. 

The prettiest of these vehicles is the curricle, 
which is also the safest. There is something 
worth looking at in the pair of horses, with 
that sparkling pole of steel laid across them. 
It is like a bar of music, comprising their har- 
monious course. But to us, even gigs are but 
a sort of unsuccessful run at gentility. The 
driver, to all intents and purposes, had better 
be on the horse. Horseback is the noblest 
way of being carried in the world. It is cheaper 
than any other mode of riding ; it is common 
to all ranks ; and it is manly, graceful, and 
healthy. The handsomest mixture of danger 
with dignity, in the shape of a carriage, was 
the tall phaeton with its yellow wings. We 
remember looking up to it with respect in our 
childhood, partly for its loftiness, partly for its 
name, and partly for the show it makes in the 
prints to novels of that period. The most 
gallant figure which modern driving ever cut, 
was in the person of a late Duke of Hamilton ; 
of whom we have read or heard somewhere, 
that he used to dash round the streets of Rome, 
with his horses panting, and his hounds barking 
about his phaeton, to the equal fright and ad- 
miration of the Masters of the World, who were 
accustomed to witness nothing higher than a 
lumbering old coach, or a cardinal on a mule. 

A post-chaise involves the idea of travelling, 
which in the company of those we love is home 
in motion. The smooth running along the 
road, the fresh air, the variety of scene, the 
leafy roads, the bursting prospects, the clatter 
through a town, the gaping gaze of a village, 
the hearty appetite, the leisure (your chaise 
waiting only upon your own movements), even 
the little contradictions to home-comfort, and 
the expedients upon which they set us, all put 
the animal spirits at work, and throw a novelty 
over the road of life. If anything could grind 
us young again, it would be the wheels of a 
post-chaise. The only monotonous sight is the 
perpetual up-and-down movement of the pos- 
tilion, who, we wish exceedingly, could take a 
chair. His occasional retreat to the bar which 
occupies the place of a box, and his affecting 
to sit upon it, only remind us of its exquisite 
want of accommodation. But some have given 
the bar, lately, a surreptitious squeeze in the 
middle, and flattened it a little into something 
obliquely resembling an inconvenient seat. 

If we are to believe the merry Columbus of 
Down-Hall, calashes, now almost obsolete for 
any purpose, used to be hired for travelling 
occasions a hundred years back ; but he pre- 
ferred a chariot ; and neither was good. Yet 
see how pleasantly good-humour rides over its 
inconveniences. 

Then answer'd 'Squire Morley, " Pray get a calash, 
That in summer may hum, and in winter may splash ; 
I love dirt and dust ; and 'tis always my pleasure 
To take with me much of the soil that I measure." 



COACHES. 



13 



But Matthew thought hetter ; for Matthew thought right, 
And hired a chariot so trim and so tight, 
That extremes both of winter and summer might pass ; 
For one window was canvas, the other was glass. 

" Draw up," quoth friend Matthew ; " Pull down," quoth 

friend John ; 
" We shall be both hotter and colder anon." 
Thus, talking and scolding, they forward did speed ; 
And Ralpho paced by under Newman the Swede. 

Into an old inn did this equipage roll, 
At a town they call Hodson, the sign of the Bull; 
Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway, 
And into a puddle throws mother of tea. 

" Come here, my sweet landlady, pray how d'ye do ? 
Where is Cicely so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue ? 
And where is the widow that dwelt here below ? 
And the hostler that sung about eight years ago ? 

And where is your sister, so mild and so dear, 
Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear ?" 
" By my troth," she replies, " you grow younger, I think : 
And pray, Sir, what wine does the gentleman drink ? 

" Why now let me die, Sir, or live upon trust, 

If I know to which question to answer you first : 

Why, things, since I saw you, most strangely have varied ; 

The hostler is hang'd, and the widow is married. 

" And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse, 
And Cicely went off with a gentleman's purse ; 
And as to my sister, so mild and so dear, 
She has lain in the church-yard full many a year." 

" Well ; peace to her ashes ! What signifies grief ? 
She roasted red veal, and she powder'd lean beef : 
Full nicely she knew to cook up a fine dish ; 
For tough were her pullets, and tender her fish."— Prior. 

This quotation reminds us of a little poem by 
the same author, entitled the Secretary, which, 
as it is short, and runs upon chaise-wheels, and 
seems to have slipped the notice it deserves, 
we will do ourselves the pleasure of adding. It 
was written when he was Secretary of Embassy 
at the Hague, where he seems to have edified 
the Dutch with his insisting upon enjoying him- 
self. The astonishment with which the good 
Hollander and his wife look up to him as he 
rides, and the touch of yawning dialect at the 
end, are extremely pleasant. 

While with labour assiduous due pleasure I mix, 
And in one day atone for the business of six, 
In a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night, 
On my left hand my Horace, a nymph on my right : 
No Memoirs to compose, and no Post-boy to move, 
That on Sunday may hinder the softness of love ; 
For her, neither visits, nor parties at tea, 
Nor the long-winded cant of a dull Refugee : 
This night and the next shall be hers, shall be mine- 
To good or ill-fortune the third we resign : 
Thus scorning the world and superior to fate, 
I drive on my car in processional state. 
So with Phia through Athens Pisistratus rode ; 
Men thought her Minerva, and him a new god. 
But why should I stories of Athens rehearse, 
Where people knew love, and were partial to verse ? 
Since none can with justice my pleasures oppose, 
In Holland half drowned in interest and prose ? 
By Greece and past ages what need I be tried, 
When the Hague and the present are both on my side ? 
And is it enough for the joys of the day, 
To think what Anacreon or Sappho would say ? 
When good Vandergoes, and his provident^urow, 
As they gaze on my triumph, do freely allow, 
That, search all the province, you'll find no man ddr is 
So ble3t as the Englishen Heer Secretar' is. 



If Prior had been living now, he would have 
found the greatest want of travelling accommo- 
dation in a country for whose more serious 
wants we have to answer, without having her 
wit to help us to an excuse. There is a story 
told of an Irish post-chaise, the occupier of 
which, without quitting it, had to take to his 
heels. It was going down hill as fast as wind 
and the impossibility of stopping could make 
it, when the foot passengers observed a couple 
of legs underneath, emulating, with all their 
might, the rapidity of the wheels. The bottom 
had come out ; and the gentleman was obliged 
to run for his life. 

"We must relate another anecdote of an Irish 
post-chaise, merely to show the natural tenden- 
cies of the people to be lawless in self-defence. 
A friend of ours *, who was travelling among 
them, used to have this proposition put to him 
by the postilion whenever he approached a 
turnpike. " Plase your honour, will I drive at 
the pike ?" The pike hung loosely across the 
road. Luckily, the rider happened to be of as 
lawless a turn for justice as the driver, so the 
answer was always a cordial one : — " Oh yes — 
drive at the pike." The pike made way accord- 
ingly ; and in a minute or two, the gate people 
were heard and seen, screaming in vain after 
the illegal charioteers. 

Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus. — Virgil. 

The driver 's borne beyond their swearing, 
And the post-chaise is hard of hearing. 

As to following them, nobody in Ireland 
thinks of moving too much, legal or illegal. 

The pleasure to be had in a mail-coach is not 
so much at one's command, as that in a post- 
chaise. There is generally too little room in it, 
and too much hurry out of it. The company 
must not lounge over their breakfast, even if 
they are all agreed. It is an understood thing, 
that they are to be uncomfortably punctual. 
They must get in at seven o'clock, though they 
are all going upon business they do not like or 
care about, or will have to wait till nine before 
they can do any thing. Some persons know 
how to manage this haste, and breakfast and 
dine in the cracking of a whip. They stick 
with their fork, they joint, they sliver, they bolt. 
Legs and wings vanish before them like a dra- 
gon's before a knight-errant. But if one is not 
a clergyman or a regular jolly fellow, one has 
no chance this way. To be diffident or polite, 
is fatal. It is a merit eagerly acknowledged, 
and as quickly set aside. At last you begin 
upon a leg, and are called off. 

A very troublesome degree of science is 
necessary for being well settled in the coach. 
We remember travelling in our youth, upon 
the north road, with an orthodox elderly gen- 
tleman of venerable peruke, who talked much 
with a grave-looking young man about univer- 

* Mr. Shelley. 



14 



THE INDICATOR. 



sities, and won our inexperienced heart with a 
notion that he was deep in Horace and Virgil. 
He was deeper in his wig. Towards evening, 
as he seemed restless, we asked with much 
diffidence whether a change, even for the worse, 
might not relieve him ; for we were riding 
backwards, and thought that all elderly people 
disliked that way. He insinuated the very 
objection ; so we recoiled from asking him 
again. In a minute or two, however, he insisted 
that we were uneasy ourselves, and that he 
must relieve us for our own sake. We pro- 
tested as filially as possible against this ; but at 
last, out of mere shame of disputing the point 
with so benevolent an elder, we changed seats 
with him. After an interval of bland medita- 
tion, we found the evening sun full in our face. 
— His new comfort set him dozing ; and every 
now and then he jerked his wig in our eyes, 
till we had the pleasure of seeing him take out 
a nightcap and look very ghastly. — The same 
person, and his serious young companion, trick- 
ed us out of a good bed we happened to get at 
the inn. 

The greatest peculiarity attending a mail- 
coach arises from its travelling at night. The 
gradual decline of talk, the incipient snore, the 
rustling and shifting of legs and nightcaps, the 
cessation of other noises on the road— the sound 
of the wind or rain, of the moist circuit of the 
wheels, and of the time-beating tread of the horses 
— ail dispose the traveller, who cannot sleep, 
to a double sense of the little that . is left him 
to observe. The coach stops, the door opens, 
a rush of cold air announces the demands and 
merits of the guard, who is taking his leave, 
and is anxious to remember us. The door is 
clapped to again ; the sound of everything out- 
side becomes dim ; and voices are heard knock- 
ing up the people of the inn, and answered by 
issuing yawns and excuses. Wooden shoes 
clog heavily about. The horses' mouths are 
heard, swilling up the water out of tubs. 
All is still again, and some one in the coach 
takes a long breath. The driver mounts, and 
we resume our way. It happens that we can 
sleep anywhere except in a mail-coach ; so 
that we hate to see a prudent, warm, old fellow, 
who has been eating our fowls and intercepting 
our toast, put on his night-cap in order to settle 
himself till morning. We rejoice in the digs 
that his neighbour's elbow gives him, and hail 
the long-legged traveller that sits opposite. A 
passenger of our wakeful description must try 
to content himself with listening to the sounds 
above mentioned ; or thinking of his friends ; 
or turning verses, as Sir Richard Blackmore 
did, " to the rumbling of his coach's wheels." 

The stage-coach is a great and unpretending 
accommodation. It is a cheap substitute, not- 
withstanding all its eighteen-penny and two- 
and-sixpenny temptations, for keeping a car- 
riage or a horse ; and we really think, in spite 
of its gossiping, is no mean help to village 



liberality ; for its passengers are so mixed, so 
often varied, so little yet so much together, so 
compelled to accommodate, so willing to pass 
a short time pleasantly, and so liable to the criti- 
cism of strangers, that it is hard if they do not 
get a habit of speaking, or even thinking more 
kindly of one another than if they mingled 
less often, or under other circumstances. The 
old and infirm are treated with reverence; 
the ailing sympathised with ; the healthy con- 
gratulated ; the rich not distinguished ; the 
poor well met : the young, with their faces 
conscious of ride, patronised, and allowed to 
be extra. Even the fiery, nay the fat, learn to 
bear with each other ; and if some high 
thoughted persons will talk now and then of 
their great acquaintances, or their preference 
of a carriage, there is an instinct which tells 
the rest, that they would not make such ap- 
peals to their good opinion, if they valued it so 
little as might be supposed. Stoppings and 
dust are not pleasant, but the latter may be 
had on grander occasions.; and if any one is so 
unlucky as never to keep another stopping 
himself, he must be content with the supe- 
riority of his virtue. 

The mail or stage-coachman, upon the whole, 
is no inhuman mass of great-coat, gruffness, 
civility, and old boots. The latter is the politer, 
from the smaller range of acquaintance, and 
his necessity for preserving them. His face is 
red, and his voice rough, by the same process 
of drink and catarrh. He has a silver watch 
with a steel-chain, and plenty of loose silver in 
his pocket, mixed with halfpence. He serves 
the houses he goes by for a clock. He takes a 
glass at every alehouse ; for thirst, when it is 
dry, and for warmth when it is wet. He likes 
to show the judicious reach of his whip, by 
twigging a dog or a goose on the road, or 
children that get in the way. His tenderness 
to descending old ladies is particular. He 
touches his hat to Mr. Smith. He gives " the 
young woman" a ride, and lends her his box- 
coat in the rain. His liberality in imparting 
his knowledge to any one that has the 
good fortune to ride on the box with him, is a 
happy mixture of deference, conscious pos- 
session, and familiarity. His information chiefly 
lies in the occupancy of houses on the road, 
prize-fighters, Bow-street runners, and acci 
dents. He concludes that you know Dick 
Sams, or Old Joey, and proceeds to relate some 
of the stories that relish his pot and tobacco 
in the evening. If any of the four-in-hand 
gentry go by, he shakes his head, and thinks 
they might find something better to do. His 
contempt for them is founded on modesty. He 
tells you that his off-hand horse is as pretty a 
goer as ever was, but that Kitty — " Yeah, now 
there, Kitty, can't you be still? Kitty's a devil, 
Sir, for all you wouldn't think it." He knows 
that the boys on the road admire him, and 
gives the horses an indifferent lash with his 



COACHES. 



15 



whip as they go by. If you wish to know 
what rain and dust can do, you should look at 
his old hat. There is an indescribably placid 
and paternal look in the position of his corduroy 
knees and old top-boots on the foot-board, with 
their pointed toes and never-cleaned soles. His 
beau-ideal of appearance is a frock-coat, with 
mother-o'-pearl buttons, a striped yellow waist- 
coat, and a flower in his mouth. 

But all our praises why for Charles and Rohert? 
Rise, honest Mews, and sing the classic Bohart. 

Is the quadrijugal virtue of that learned person 
still extant ? That Olympic and Baccalau- 
reated charioteer ? — That best educated and 
mcst erudite of coachmen, of whom Dominie 
Sampson is alone worthy to speak ? That 
singular punning and driving commentary on 
the Sunt quos curriculo coUegisse ? In short, the 
worthy and agreeable Mr. Bobart, Bachelor of 
Arts, who drove the Oxford stage some years 
ago, capped verses and the front of his hat 
with equal dexterity, and read Horace over 
his brandy-and- water of an evening ? We had 
once the pleasure of being beaten by him in that 
capital art, he having brought up against us an 
unusual number of those cross-armed letters, as 
puzzling to verse-cappers as iron-cats unto 
cavalry, ycleped X's ; which said warfare he 
was pleased to call to mind in after-times, unto 
divers of our comrades. The modest and 
natural greatness with which he used to say 
"Yait" to his horses, and then turn round 
with his rosy gills, and an eye like a fish, and 
give out the required verse, can never pass 
away from us, as long as verses or horses run. 

Of the hackney-coach we cannot make as 
short work, as many persons like to make of it 
in reality. Perhaps it is partly a sense of the 
contempt it undergoes, which induces us to 
endeavour to make the best of it. But it has 
its merits, as we shall show presently. In the 
account of its demerits, we have been antici- 
pated by a new, and we are sorry to say a very 

good, poetess, of the name of Lucy V 

L , who has favoured us with a sight of a 

manuscript poem,* in which they are related 
with great nicety and sensitiveness. 

Header. What Sir, sorry to say that a lady 
is a good poetess ? 

Indicator. Only inasmuch, Madam, as the 
lady gives such authority to the antisocial view 
of this subject, and will not agree with us as 
to the beatitude of the hackney-coach. — But 
hold : — upon turning to the manuscript again, 
we find that the objections are put into the 
mouth of a dandy courtier. This makes a great 
difference. The hackney resumes all which it 
had lost in the good graces of the fair authoress. 
The only wonder is, how the courtier could talk 
so well. Here is the passage. 

* By Mr. Keats. The manuscript purports to have been 
written by a Miss Lucy Vaughan Lloyd. 



Eban, untempted by the Pastry-cooks, 
(Of Pastry he got store within the Palace,) 
With hasty steps, wrapp'd cloak, and solemn looks, 
Incognito upon his errand sallies, 
His smelling-bottle ready for the alleys ; 
He pass'd the Hurdy-gurdies with disdain, 
Vowing he'd have them sent on board the galleys : 
Just as he made his vow, it 'gan to rain, 
Therefore he call'd a coach, and bade it drive amain. 

" I'll pull the string," said he, and further said, 
" Polluted Jarvey ! Ah, thou filthy hack ! 
Whose strings of life are all dried up and dead, 
Whose linsey-wolsey lining hangs all slack, 
Whose rug is straw, whose wholeness is a crack ; 
And evermore thy steps go clatter-clitter ; 
Whose glass once up can never be got back, 
Who prov'st, with jolting arguments and bitter, 
That 'tis of vile no-use to travel in a litter. 

" Thou inconvenience ! thou hungry crop 
For all corn ! thou snail creeper to and fro, 
Who while thou goest ever seem'st to stop, 
And fiddle-faddle standest while you go ; 
I' the morning, freighted with a weight of woe, 
Unto some Lazar-house thou journiest, 
And in the evening tak'st a double row 
Of dowdies, for some dance or party drest, 
Besides the goods meanwhile thou movest east and west. 

" By thy ungallant bearing and sad mien, 
An inch appears the utmost thou couldst budge ; 
Yet at the slightest nod, or hint, or sign, 
Round to the curb-stone patient dost thou trudge, 
School'd in a beckon, learned in a nudge; 
A dull-eyed Argus watching for a fare ; 
Quiet and plodding, thou dost bear no grudge 
To whisking Tilburies or Phaetons rare, 
Curricles, or Mail-coaches, swift beyond compare." 

Philosophising thus, he pull'd the check, 
And bade the coachman wheel to such a street ; 
Who turning much his body, more his neck, 
Louted full low, and hoarsely did him greet. 

The tact here is so nice, of the infirmities which 
are but too likely to beset our poor old friend, 
that we should only spoil it to say more. To 
pass then to the merits. 

One of the greatest helps to a sense of merit 
in other things, is a consciousness of one's own 
wants. Do you despise a hackney-coach ? 
Get tired ; get old ; get young again. Lay 
down your carriage, or make it less uneasily 
too easy. Have to stand up half an hour, out 
of a storm, under a gateway. Be ill, and wish 
to visit a friend who is worse. Fall in love, 
and want to sit next your mistress. Or if all 
this will not do, fall in a cellar. 

Ben Jonson, in a fit of indignation at the 
niggardliness of James the First, exclaimed, 
" He despises me, I suppose, because I live in 
an alley : — tell him his soul lives in an alley." 
We think we see a hackney-coach moved out 
of its ordinary patience, and hear it say, " You 
there, who sit looking so scornfully at me out 
of your carriage, are yourself the thing you 
take me for. Your understanding is a hackney- 
coach. It is lumbering, rickety, and at a stand. 
When it moves, it is drawn by things like itself. 
It is at once the most stationary and the most 
servile of common-places. And when a good 
thing is put into it, it does not know it." 



if) 



THE INDICATOR. 



But it is difficult to imagine a hackney-coach 
under so irritable an aspect. Hogarth has 
drawn a set of hats or wigs with countenances 
of their own. We have noticed the same thing 
in the faces of houses ; and it sometimes gets 
in one's way in a landscape-painting, with the 
outlines of the rocks and trees. A friend tells 
us, that the hackney-coach has its countenance, 
with gesticulation besides : and now he has 
pointed it out, we can easily fancy it. Some 
of them look chucked under the chin, some 
nodding, some coming at you sideways. We 
shall never find it easy, however, to fancy the 
irritable aspect above mentioned. A hackney- 
coach always appeared to us the most quiescent 
of moveables. Its horses and it, slumbering 
on a stand, are an emblem of all the patience 
in creation, animate and inanimate. The sub- 
mission with which the coach takes every 
variety of the weather, dust, rain, and wind, 
never moving but when some eddying blast 
makes its old body shiver, is only surpassed by 
the vital patience of the horses. Can any- 
thing better illustrate the poet's line about 

' — Years that bring the philosophic mind, 

than the still-hung head, the dim indifferent 
eye, the dragged and blunt-cornered mouth, 
and the gaunt imbecility of body dropping its 
weight on three tired legs in order to give 
repose to the lame one ? When it has blinkers 
on, they seem to be shutting up its eyes for 
death, like the windows of a house. Fatigue 
and the habit of suffering have become as 
natural to the creature as the bit to its mouth. 
Once in half an hour it moves the position of 
its leg, or shakes its drooping ears. The whip 
makes it go, more from habit than from pain. 
Its coat has become almost callous to minor 
stings. The blind and staggering fly in autumn 
might come to die against its cheek. 

Of a pair of hackney-coach horses, one so 
much resembles the other that it seems un- 
necessary for them to compare notes. They 
have that within them, which is beyond the 
comparative. They no longer bend their heads 
towards each other, as they go. They stand 
together as if unconscious of one another's com- 
pany. But they are not. An old horse misses 
his companion, like an old man. The presence 
of an associate, who has gone through pain and 
suffering with us, need not say anything. 
It is talk, and memory, and everything. Some- 
thing of this it may be to our old friends in 
harness. What are they thinking of, while 
they stand motionless in the rain? Do they 
remember ? Do they dream ? Do they still, 
unperplexed as their old blood is by too many 
foods, receive a pleasure from the elements ; 
a dull refreshment from the air and sun ? 
Have they yet a palate for the hay which they 
pull so feebly ? or for the rarer grain, which 
induces them to perform their only voluntary 
gesture of any vivacity, and toss up the bags 



that are fastened on their mouths, to get at its 
shallow feast ? 

If the old horse were gifted with memory, 
(and who shall say he is not, in one thing as 
well as another ?) it might be at once the most 
melancholy and pleasantest faculty he has ; for 
the commonest hack has probably been a hun- 
ter or racer ; has had his days of lustre and 
enjoyment ; has darted along the course, and 
scoured the pasture ; has carried his master 
proudly, or his lady gently ; has pranced, has 
galloped, has neighed aloud, has dared, has 
forded, has spurned at mastery, has graced it 
and made it proud, has rejoiced the eye, has 
been crowded to as an actor, has been all in- 
stinct with life and quickness, has had his 
very fear admired as courage, and been sat 
upon by valour as its chosen seat. 

His ears up-prick'd ; his braided hanging mane 
Upon his compass'd crest now stands on end ; 
His nostrils drink the air ; and forth again, 
As from a furnace, vapours doth he send ; 

His eye, which scornfully glistens like fire, 
Shows his hot courage and his high desire. 

Sometimes he trots as if he told the steps, 

With gentle majesty, and modest pride ; 

Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps, 

As who would say, lo ! thus my strength is tried, 
And thus I do to captivate the eye 
Of the fair breeder that is standing by. 

What recketh he his rider's angry stir, 

His flattering holla, or his Stand, I say ? 

What cares he now for curb, or pricking spur ? 

For rich caparisons, or trappings gay ? 

He sees his love, and nothing else he sees, 
For nothing else with his proud sight agrees. 

Look, when a painter would surpass the life, 

In limning out a well-proportion'd steed, 

His art with nature's workmanship at strife, 

As if the dead the living should exceed ; 

So did this horse excel a common one, 

In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone. 

Round-hoof 'd, short-jointed, fetlock shag and long, 

Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide ; 

High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong; 

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide ; 
Look, what a horse should have, he did not lack, 
Save a proud rider on so proud a back. 

Alas ! his only riders now are the rain and 
a sordid harness ! The least utterance of the 
wretchedest voice makes him stop and become 
a fixture. His loves were in existence at the 
time the old sign, fifty miles hence, was painted. 
His nostrils drink nothing but what they cannot 
help, — the water out of an old tub. Not all 
the hounds in the world could make his ears 
attain any eminence. His mane is scratchy 
and lax. The same great poet who wrote the 
triumphal verses for him and his loves, has 
written their living epitaph : — 

The poor jades 
Lob down their heads, dropping the hide and hips, 
The gum down roping from their pale dead eyes ; 
And in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit 
Lies foul with chew'd grass, still and motionless. 

K. Henry nth, Act 4. 



COACHES 



17 



There is a song called the High-mettled Racer, 
describing the progress of a favourite horse's 
life, from its time of vigour and glory, down 
to its furnishing food for the dogs. It is not 
as good as Shakspeare ; but it will do, to those 
who are half as kind as he. "We defy anybody 
to read that song or be in the habit of singing 
it or hearing it sung, and treat horses as they 
are sometimes treated. So much good may an 
author do, who is in earnest, and does not go 
in a pedantic way to work. "We will not say 
that Plutarch's good-natured observation about 
taking care of one's old horse did more for 
that class of retired servants than all the graver 
lessons of philosophy. For it is philosophy 
which first sets people thinking ; and then 
some of them put it in a more popular shape. 
But we will venture to say, that Plutarch's 
observation saved many a steed of antiquity a 
superfluous thump ; and in this respect, the 
author of the High-mettled Racer (Mr. Dibdin 
we believe, no mean man in his way) may 
stand by the side of the old illustrious biogra- 
pher. Next to ancient causes, to the inevitable 
progress of events, and to the practical part of 
Christianity ( which persons, the most accused 
of irreligion, have preserved like a glorious in- 
fant, through ages of blood and fire) the kind- 
liness of modern philosophy is more immedi- 
ately owing to the great national writers of 
Europe, in whose schools we have all been 
children : — to Voltaire in France, and Shak- 
speare in England. Shakspeare, in his time, 
obliquely pleaded the cause of the Jew, and 
got him set on a common level with humanity. 
The Jew has since been not only allowed to be 
human, but some have undertaken to show 
him as the "best good Christian though he 
knows it not." "We shall not dispute the title 
with him, nor with the other worshippers of 
Mammon, who force him to the same shrine. 
"We allow, as things go in that quarter, that 
the Jew is as great a Christian as his neighbour, 
and his neighbour as great a Jew as he. There 
is neither love nor money lost between them. 
But at all events, the Jew is a man ; and with 
Shakspeare's assistance, the time has arrived, 
when we can afford to acknowledge the horse 
for a fellow-creature, and treat him as one. 
We may say for him, upon the same grounds 
and to the same purpose, as Shakspeare said 
for the Israelite, ** Hath not a horse organs, 
dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? hurt 
with the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed 
and cooled by the same winter and summer, as 
a Christian is ?" Oh — but some are always 
at hand to cry out, — it would be effeminate to 
think too much of these things! — Alas! we 
have no notion of asking the gentlemen to 
think too much of anything. If they will 
think at all, it will be a great gain. As to 
effeminacy (if we must use that ungallant and 
partial word, for want of a better) it is cruelty 

[part II.] 



that is effeminate. It is selfishness that is 
effeminate. Anything is effeminate, which 
would get an excitement, or save a proper and 
manly trouble, at the undue expense of an- 
other. — How does the case stand then between 
those who ill-treat their horses, and those who 
spare them ? 

To return to the coach. Imagine a fine 
coach and pair, which are standing at the door 
of a house, in all the pride of their strength 
and beauty, converted into what they may both 
become, a hackney, and its old shamblers. 
Such is one of the meditations of the philoso- 
phic eighteenpenny rider. A hackney-coach 
has often the arms of nobility on it. As we 
are going to get into it, we catch a glimpse of 
the faded lustre of an earl's or marquis's coro- 
net, and think how many light or proud hearts 
have ascended those now ricketty steps. In 
this coach perhaps an elderly lady once rode 
to her wedding, a blooming and blushing girl. 
Her mother and sister were on each side of 
her; the bridegroom opposite in a blossom- 
coloured coat. They talk of everything in the 
world of which they are not thinking. The 
sister was never prouder of her. The mother 
with difficulty represses her own pride and 
tears. The bride, thinking he is looking at 
her, casts down her eyes, pensive in her joy. 
The bridegroom is at once the proudest, and 
the humblest, and the happiest man in the 
world — For our parts, we sit in a corner, and 
are in love with the sister. We dream she is 
going to speak to us in answer to some indif- 
ferent question, when a hoarse voice comes in 
at the front window, and says " Whereabouts 
Sir!" 

And grief has consecrated thee, thou reverend 
dilapidation, as well as joy ! Thou hast carried 
unwilling, as well as willing hearts ; hearts, 
that have thought the slowest of thy paces too 
fast ; faces that have sat back in a comer of 
thee, to hide their tears from the very thought 
of being seen. In thee the destitute have been 
taken to the poor-house, and the wounded and 
sick to the hospital ; and many an arm has been 
round many an insensible waist. Into thee the 
friend or the lover has hurried, in a pas- 
sion of tears, to lament his loss. In thee he 
has hastened to condole the dying or the 
wretched. In thee the father, or mother, or 
the older kinswoman, more patient in her 
years, has taken the little child to the grave, 
the human jewel that must be parted with. 

But joy appears in thee again, like the look-in 
of the sun-shine. If the lover has gone in thee 
unwillingly, he has also gone willingly. How 
many friends hast thou not carried to merry- 
meetings ! How many young parties to the 
play ! How many children, whose faces thou 
hast turned in an instant from the extremity 
of lachrymose weariness to that of staring 
delight. Thou hast contained as many different 
passions in thee as a human heart ; and for the 



18 



THE INDICATOR. 



sake of the human heart, old body, thou art 
venerable. Thou shalt be as respectable as a 
reduced old gentleman, whose very slovenliness 
is pathetic. Thou shalt be made gay, as he is 
over a younger and richer table, and thou shalt 
be still more touching for the gaiety. 

"We wish the hackney-coachman were as in- 
teresting a machine as either his coach or 
horses ; but it must be owned, that of all the 
driving species he is the least agreeable speci- 
men. This is partly to be attributed to the 
life which has most probably put him into his 
situation ; partly to his want of outside pas- 
sengers to cultivate his gentility ; and partly 
to the disputable nature of his fare, which al- 
ways leads him to be lying and cheating. The 
waterman of the stand, who beats him in sor- 
didness of appearance, is more respectable. 
He is less of a vagabond, and cannot cheat you. 
Nor is the hackney-coachman only disagreeable 
in himself, but, like FalstafF reversed, the cause 
of disagreeableness in others ; for he sets 
people upon disputing with him in pettiness 
and ill-temper. He induces the mercenary to 
be violent, and the violent to seem mercenary. 
A man whom you took for a pleasant laughing 
fellow, shall all of a sudden put on an irrita- 
ble look of calculation, and vow that he will be 
charged with a constable, rather than pay the 
sixpence. Even fair woman shall waive her 
all-conquering softness, and sound a shrill 
trumpet in reprobation of the extortionate 
charioteer, whom, if she were a man, she says, 
she would expose. Being a woman, then, let 
her not expose herself. Oh, but it is intolera- 
ble to be so imposed upon ! Let the lady, then, 
get a pocket book, if she must, with the hack- 
ney-coach fares in it ; or a pain in the legs, 
rather than the temper ; or, above all, let her 
get wiser, and have an understanding that can 
dispense with the good opinion of the hackney- 
coachman. Does she think that her rosy lips 
were made to grow pale about two-and-six- 
pence ; or that the expression of them will 
ever be like her cousin Fanny's, if she goes 
on? 

The stage-coachman likes the boys on the 
road, because he knows they admire him. 
The hackney-coachman knows that they cannot 
admire him, and that they can get up behind 
his coach, which makes him very savage. The 
cry of " Cut behind ! " from the malicious 
urchins on the pavement, wounds at once his 
self-love and his interest. He would not mind 
overloading his master's horses for another 
sixpence, but to do it for nothing is what shocks 
his humanity. He hates the boy for imposing 
upon him, and the boys for reminding him that 
he has been imposed upon ; and he would will- 
ingly twinge the cheeks of all nine. The cut 
of his whip over the coach is malignant. He 
has a constant eye to the road behind him. 
He has also an eye to what may be left in the 
coach. He will undertake to search the straw 



for you, and miss the half-crown on purpose. 
He speculates on what he may get above his 
fare, according to your manners or company ; 
and knows how much to ask for driving faster 
or slower than usual. He does not like wet 
weather so much as people suppose ; for he 
says it rots both his horses and harness, and he 
takes parties out of town when the weather is 
fine, which produces good payments in a lump. 
Lovers, late supper-eaters, and girls going home 
from boarding-school, are his best pay. He 
has a rascally air of remonstrance when you 
dispute half the over-charge, and according to 
the temper he is in, begs you to consider his 
bread, hopes you will not make such a fuss 
about a trifle ; or tells you, you may take his 
number or sit in the coach all night. 

A great number of ridiculous adventures 
must have taken place, in which hackney- 
coaches were concerned. The story of the 
celebrated harlequin Lunn, who secretly pitched 
himself out of one into a tavern window, and 
when the coachman was about to submit to the 
loss of his fare, astonished him by calling out 
again from the inside, is too well known for 
repetition. There is one of Swift, not perhaps 
so common. He was going, one dark evening, 
to dine with some great man, and was accom- 
panied by some other clergymen, to whom he 
gave their cue. They were all in their canoni- 
cals. When they arrive at the house, the 
coachman opens the door, and lets down the 
steps. Down steps the Dean, very reverend in 
his black robes ; after him comes another per- 
sonage, equally black and dignified ; then 
another ; then a fourth. The coachman, who 
recollects taking up no greater number, is 
about to put up the steps, when another clergy- 
man descends. After giving way to this other, 
he proceeds with great confidence to toss them 
up, when lo ! another comes. Well, there 
cannot, he thinks, be more than six. He is 
mistaken. Down comes a seventh, then an 
eighth ; then a ninth ; all with decent intervals ; 
the coach, in the mean time, rocking as if it 
were giving birth to so many daemons. The 
coachman can conclude no less. He cries out, 
" The devil ! the devil ! " and is preparing to 
run away, when they all burst into laughter. 
They had gone round as they descended, and 
got in at the other door. 

We remember in our boyhood an edifying 
comment on the proverb of " all is not gold 
that glistens." The spectacle made such an 
impression upon us, that we recollect the very 
spot, which was at the corner of a road in the way 
from Westminster to Kennington,near a stone- 
mason's. It was a severe winter, and we were 
out on a holiday, thinking, perhaps, of the gal- 
lant hardships to which the ancient soldiers 
accustomed themselves, when we suddenly be- 
held a group of hackney-coachmen, not, as 
Spenser says of his witch, 

Busy, as seemed, about some wicked gin, 



REMARKS UPON ANDREA DE BASSO'S ODE TO A DEAD BODY. 



10 



but pledging each other in what appeared to us 
to be little glasses of cold water. What tem- 
perance, thought we ! What extraordinary 
and noble content ! What more than Roman 
simplicity ! Here are a set of poor English- 
men, of the homeliest order, in the very depth 
of winter, quenching their patient and honour- 
able thirst with modicums of cold water ! O 
true virtue and courage ! O sight worthy of 
the Timoleons and Epaminondases ! We know 
not how long we remained in this error ; but 
the first time we recognised the white devil for 
what it was — the first time we saw through the 
crystal purity of its appearance — was a great 
blow to us. We did not then know what the 
drinkers went through ; and this reminds us 
that we have omitted one great redemption of 
the hackney-coachman's character — his being 
at the mercy of all chances and weathers. 
Other drivers have their settled hours and pay. 
He only is at the mercy of every call and every 
casualty ; he only is dragged, without notice, 
like the damned in Milton, into the extremities 
of wet and cold, from his alehouse lire to the 
freezing rain ; he only must go any where, at 
what hour and to whatever place you choose, 
his old rheumatic limbs shaking under his weight 
of rags, and the snow and sleet beating into his 
puckered face, through streets which the wind 
scours like a channel. 



XLIX.— REMARKS UPON ANDREA DE 
BASSO'S ODE TO A DEAD BODY*. 

We are given to understand by the Italian 
critics, that this poem made a great sensation, 
and was alone thought sufficient to render its 
author of celebrity. Its loathly heroine had 
been a beauty of Ferrara, proud and luxurious. 
It is written in a fierce Catholic spirit, and is 
incontestably very striking and even appalling. 
Images, which would only be disgusting on 
other occasions, affect us beyond disgust, by 
the strength of such earnestness and sincerity. 
Andrea de Basso lays bare the mortifying con- 
clusions of the grave, and makes the pride of 
beauty bow down to them. The picture of the 
once beautiful, proud, and unthinking creature, 
caught and fixed down in a wasting trap, — the 
calling upon her to come forth, and see if any 
will no w be won into her arms, — the taunts about 
the immortal balm which she thought she had 
in her veins, — the whole, in short, of the terri- 
ble disadvantage under which she is made to 
listen with unearthly ears to the poet's lecture, 
affects the imagnation to shuddering. 

No wonder that such an address made a sen- 
sation, even upon the gaiety of a southern city. 

* The reader will gather the substance of it from what 
follows. The ode is to be found in the sixth volume of 
the Parnaso Italiano. A translation has appeared in the 
volume of the author's Poetical Works, just published. , 



One may conceive how it fixed the superstitious 
more closely over their meditations and skulls ; 
how it sent the young, and pious, and humble, 
upon their knees ; how it baulked the vivacity 
of the serenaders ; brought tears into the eyes 
of affectionate lovers ; and shot doubt and con- 
fusion even into the cheeks of the merely 
wanton. Andrea de Basso, armed with the 
lightnings of his church, tore the covering from 
the grave, and smote up the heart of Ferrara 
as with an earthquake. 

For a lasting impression, however, or for 
such a one as he would have desired, the author, 
with all his powers, overshot his mark. Men 
build again over earthquakes, as nature resumes 
her serenity. The Ferrarese returned to their 
loves and guitars, when absolution had set them 
to rights. It was impossible that Andrea de 
Basso should have succeeded in fixing such 
impressions upon the mind ; and it would have 
been an error in logic, as well as everything 
else, if he had. He committed himself, both as 
a theologian and a philosopher. There is an 
allusion, towards the end of his ode, to the 
Catholic notion, that the death of a saintly 
person is accompanied by what they call " the 
odour of sanctity ; " — a literalised metaphor, 
which they must often have been perplexed to 
maintain. But the assents of superstition, and 
the instinct of common sense, keep a certain 
separation at bottom ; and the poet drew such 
a picture of mortality, as would unavoidably be 
applied to every one, vicious or virtuous. It 
was too close and mortifying, even for the 
egotism of religious fancy to overcome. All 
would have an interest in contradicting it some- 
how or other. 

On the other hand, if they could not well 
contradict or bear to think of it, his mark was 
overshot there. It has been observed, in times 
of shipwrecks, plagues, and other circumstances 
of a common despair, that upon the usual prin- 
ciple of extremes meeting, mankind turn upon 
Death their pursuer, and defy him to the teeth. 
The superstitious in vain exhort them to think, 
and threaten them with the consequences of 
refusal. They have threats enough. If they 
could think to any purpose of refreshment, they 
would. But time presses ; the exhortation is 
too like the evil it would remedy ; and they 
endeavour to crowd into a few moments all the 
enjoyments to which nature has given them a 
tendency, and to which, with a natural piety 
beyond that of their threateners, they feel that 
they have both a tendency and a right. If many 
such odes as Basso's could have been written, — 
if the court of Ferrara had turned superstitious 
and patronised such productions, the next age 
would not merely have been lively ; it would 
have been debauched. 

Again, the reasoning of such appeals to the 
general sense is absurd in itself. They call 
upon us to join life and death together ; — to 
think of what we are not, with the feelings of 



20 



THE INDICATOR. 



what we are ; to be different, and yet the same. 
Hypochondria may do this ; a melancholy 
imagination, or a strong imagination of any sort, 
may do it for a time ; but it will never be done 
generally, and nature never intended it should. 
A decaying dead body is no more the real hu- 
man being, than a watch, stopped and mutilated, 
is a time-piece, or cold water warm, or a numb 
finger in the same state of sensation as the one 
next it, or any one modification of being the 
same as another. We may pitch ourselves by 
imagination into this state of being ; but it is 
ourselves, modified by our present totalities and 
sensation, that we do pitch there. What we 
may be otherwise, is another thing. The melan- 
choly imagination may give it melancholy fan- 
cies ; the livelier one, if it pleases, may suppose 
it a state of exquisite dissolution. The philo- 
sopher sees in it nothing but a contradiction 
to the life by which we judge of it, and a disso- 
lution of the compounds which held us together. 
There is one thing alone in such gloomy beg- 
gings of a question, which throws them back 
upon the prescriptions of wisdom, and prevents 
them from becoming general. They are always 
accompanied by ill-health. We do not mean a 
breaking up of the frame, or that very road to 
death, which may be a kindly and cheerful one, 
illumined by the sunset, as youth was by the 
dawn : but a polluted and artificial state of 
blood, or an insufficient vigour of existence, — 
that state, in short, which is an exception to 
the general condition of humanity, and acts 
like the proof of a rule to the intentions of 
Nature. For these are so kind, that no mistake 
in the world, not even vice itself, is so sure to 
confuse a man's sensations and render them 
melancholy, as ill-health. Nature seems to say 
to us, " Be, above all things, as natural as you 
can be, — as much as possible in the best fashion 
of the mould in which I cast you, — and you 
shall be happy." Nor is this unlucky for virtue, 
but most lucky : for it takes away its pride, 
and leaves it its cheerfulness. Real vice will 
soon be found to be real unhealthiness : nor 
could society have a better guide to the reform- 
ation of its moral systems, than by making them 
as compatible as possible with every healthy 
impulse. But why, it may be asked, are we 
not all healthy ? It is impossible to say : but 
this is certain, that the oftener a man asks him- 
self that question, the more intimations he has 
that he is to try and get out of the tendency 
to ask them. We may live elsewhere : we 
may be compounded over again, and receive a 
new consciousness here ; — a guess which, if it 
seems dreary at first, might lead us to make a 
heaven of the earth we live in, even for our own 
sakes hereafter. But at all events, put, as 
Jupiter says in the fable, your shoulder to the 
wheel ; and put it as cheerfully as you can. 
The way that Andrea de Basso should have set 
about reforming the Ferrarese beauties, would 
have been to show them^ that their enjoyments 



were hurtful in proportion as they were extra- 
vagant, and less than they might be, in propor- 
tion as they were in bad taste. But to ask the 
healthy to be hypochondriacal : the beautiful 
to think gratuitously of ugliness ; and the 
giddy, much less the wise, to desire to be angels 
in heaven, by representing God as a cruel and 
eternal punisher, — is what never could, and 
never ought to have, a lasting effect on hu- 
manity. 

It has been well observed, that life is a series 
of present sensations. It might be added,that 
the consciousness of the present moment is 
one of the strongest of those sensations. Still 
this consciousness is a series, not a line ; a 
variety with intervals, not a continuity and a 
haunting. If it were, it would be unhealthy : 
if it were unhealthy, it would be melancholy ; 
if it were melancholy, the evident system upon 
which nature acts would be different. Thus 
it is impossible that men should be finally led 
by gloomy, and not by pleasant doctrines. 

When the Ferrarese ladies read the poem of 
Andrea de Basso, it occupied the series of their 
sensations for a little while, more or less ac- 
cording to their thoughtfulness, and more or 
less, even then, according to their unhealthiness. 
The power of voluntary thought is propor- 
tioned to the state of the health. In a little 
time, the Ferrarese, being like other multitudes, 
and even gayer, would turn to their usual re- 
flections and enjoyments, as they accordingly 
did. About that period Ariosto was born. 
He rose to vindicate the charity and good-will 
of nature ; and put forth more real wisdom, 
truth, and even piety, in his willing enjoy- 
ment of the creation, than all the monks in 
Ferrara could have mustered together for cen- 
turies. 

To conclude, Andrea de Basso mistook his 
own self, as well as the means of instructing 
his callous beauty. We can imagine her dis- 
agreeable enough. There are few things more 
oppressive to the heart, than the want of 
feeling in those whose appearance leads others 
to feel intensely — the sight of beauty sacri- 
ficing its own real comfort as well as ours, by 
a heartless and indiscriminate love of admira- 
tion from young and old, from the gross and 
the refined, the wise and the foolish, the good- 
natured and the ill-natured, the happy-making 
and the vicious. If Andrea de Basso's heroine 
was one of this stamp, we can imagine her to 
have irritated his best feelings, as well as his 
more equivocal. We hope she was not merely 
a giddy creature, who had not quite patience 
enough with her confessor. Alfred the Great, 
when a youth, was accustomed to turn a deaf 
ear to the didactics of his holy kinsman St. 
Neot ; for which, says the worthy Bishop 
Asser, who was nevertheless a great admirer 
of the king, and wrote his life, all those troubles 
were afterwards brought upon him and his 
kingdom. Be this as it may, and supposing 



, / r 
1 i 



J 



THOUGHTS AND GUESSES ON HUMAN NATURE. 



21 



the Ferrarese beauty to have been an unfeeling 
one, the poet was not aware, while triumphing 
over her folly, and endeavouring to enjoy the 
thought of her torments, that he was con- 
founding the sentiment of the thing with its 
reverse, and doing his best to make himself a 
worse and more hard-hearted person than she. 
His efforts to induce us to think lightly of the 
most beautiful things in the external world, by 
showing us that they will not always be what 
they are — that a smooth and graceful limb 
will not for ever be the same smooth and 
graceful limb, nor an eye an eye, nor an apple 
an apple, are not as wise as they are poetical. 
To have said that the limb, unless admired 
with sentiment as well as with ordinary admi- 
ration, is a common-place thing to what it 
might be, and that there is more beauty in it 
than the lady supposed, would have been good. 
To make nothing of it, because she did not 
make as much as she could, is unwise. But 
above all, to consign her to eternal punishment 
in the next world, because she gave rise to a 
series of fugitive evils in this — granting even 
that she, and not her wrong education, was 
the cause of them — is one of those idle worry- 
ings of himself and others, which only perplex 
further what they cannot explain, and have at 
last fairly sickened the world into a sense of 
their unhealthiness. 

What then remains of the poetical denounce- 
ments of Andrea de Basso ? Why the only 
thing which ought to remain, and which when 
left to itself retains nothing but its pleasure — 
their poetry. When Dante and Milton shall 
cease to have any effect as religious dogma- 
tisers, they will still be the mythological 
poets of one system of belief, as Homer is of 
another. So immortal is pleasure, and so 
surely does it escape out of the throng of its 
contradictions. 



L.— THOUGHTS AND GUESSES ON 
HUMAN NATURE. 

CONFUSION OF MODES OF BEING. 

People undertake to settle what ideas they 
shall have under such and such circumstances 
of being, when it is nothing but their present 
state of being that enables them to have those 
ideas. 

VARIETY OF THE COLOURS OF PERCEPTION. 

There is reason to suppose, that our percep- 
tions and sensations are more different than we 
imagine, even upon the most ordinary things, 
such as visible objects in general, and the sense 
of existence. We have enough in common, for 
common intercourse ; but the details are dis- 
similar, as we may perceive in the variety of 
palates. All people are agreed upon sweet 
and sour ; but one man prefers sour to sweet, 
and another this and that variety of sour and 



sweet. "What then is the use of attempting to 
make them agree ?" Why, we may try to make 
them agree upon certain general modes of 
thinking and means of pleasure : — we may 
colour their existence in the gross, though we 
must leave the particular shades to come out 
by themselves. We may enrich their stock of 
ideas, though we cannot control the items of 
the expenditure. 

CANNOT. 

" But what if we cannot do even this?" The 
question is answered by experience. Whole 
nations and ages have already been altered in 
their modes of thinking. Even if it were 
otherwise, the endeavour is itself one of the 
varieties ; one of the modes of opinion and 
means of pleasure. Besides cannot is the 
motto neither of knowledge nor humility. 
There is more of pride, and ignorance, and 
despair, in it, than of the modesty of wisdom. 
It would settle not only the past but the 
future ; and it would settle the future, merely 
because the past has not been influenced by 
those that use it. 

Who are these men that measure futurity 
by the shadow of their own littleness ? It is 
as if the loose stones lying about a foundation 
were to say, " You can build no higher than 
our heads." 

SUPERSTITION AND DOCTRINE. 

Superstition attempts to settle everything 
by assertion ; which never did do, and never 
will. And like all assertors, even well-inclined 
ones, it shows its feebleness in anger and 
threatening. It commands us to take its pro- 
blems for granted, on pain of being tied up to 
a triangle. Then come its advocates, and 
assert that this mode of treatment is proper and 
logical : which is making bad worse. The 
worst of all is, that this is the way in which 
the finest doctrines in the world are obstructed. 
They are like an excellent child, making the 
Grand Tour with a foolish overbearing tutor. 
The tutor runs a chance of spoiling the child, 
and makes their presence disagreeable where- 
ever they go, except to their tradesmen. Let 
us hope the child has done with his tutor. 

SECOND THOUGHT ON THE VARIETY OF THE COLOURS 
OF PERCEPTION. 

We may gather from what we read of dis- 
eased imaginations, how much our perceptions 
depend upon the modification of our being. 
We see how personal and inexperienced we 
are when we determine that such and such 
ideas must take place under other circum- 
stances, and such and such truths be always 
indisputable. Pleasure must always be pleasure, 
and pain be pain, because these are only names 
for certain results. But the results themselves 
will be pleasureable or painful, according to 
what they act upon. A man in health becomes 



22 



THE INDICATOR. 



sickly; he has a fever, is light-headed, is 
hypochondriacal. His ideas are deranged, or 
re-arrange themselves ; and a set of new per- 
ceptions, and colourings of his existence, take 
place, as in a kaleidoscope when we shake it. 
The conclusion is, that every alteration of our 
physical particles, or of whatever else we are 
compounded with, produces a different set of 
perceptions and sensations. What we call 
health of body and mind is the fittest state of 
our composition upon earth : but the state of 
perception which is sickly to our state of exist- 
ence may be healthy to another. 



Of all impositions on the public, the greatest 
seems to be death. It resembles the threaten- 
ing faees on each side the Treasury. Or rather, 
it is a necessary bar to our tendency to move 
forward. Nature sends us out of her hand 
with such an impetus towards increase of en- 
joyment, that something is obliged to be set at 
the end of the avenue we are in, to moderate 
our bias, and make us enjoy the present being. 
Death serves to make us think, not of itself, 
but of what is about us. 

CHILDHOOD AND KNOWLEDGE. 

When children are in good health and 
temper, they have a sense of existence which 
seems too exquisite to last. It is made up of 
clearness of blood, freshness of perception, and 
trustingness of heart. We remember the 
time, when the green rails along a set of suburb 
gardens used to fill us with a series of holiday 
and rural sensations perfectly intoxicating. 
According to the state of our health, we have 
sunny glimpses of this feeling still ; to say 
nothing of many other pleasures, which have 
paid us for many pains. The best time to 
catch them is early in the morning, at sunrise, 
out in the country. And we will here add, 
that life never perhaps feels such a return of 
fresh and young feeling upon it, as in early 
rising on a fine morning, whether in country or 
town. The healthiness of it, the quiet, the con- 
sciousness of having done a sort of young 
action (not to add a wise one), and the sense 
of power it gives you over the coming day, 
produce a mixture of buoyancy and self-posses- 
sion, in which a sick man must not despair of, 
because he does not feel it the first morning. 
But even this reform should be adopted by 
degrees. The best way to recommend it is to 
begin with allowing fair play to the other side 
of the question. (See the article upon Getting 
up on Cold Mornings.) To return to our main 
point. After childhood comes a knowledge of 
evil, or a sophisticate and unhealthy mode of 
life ; or one produces the other, and both are 
embittered. Everything tells us to get back 
to a state of childhood — pain, pleasure, imagi- 
nation, reason, passion, natural affection, or 
piety, the better part of religion. If know- 



ledge is supposed to be incompatible with it, 
knowledge would sacrifice herself, if necessary, 
to the same cause, for she also tells us to do so. 
But as a little knowledge first leads us away 
from happiness, so a greater knowledge may 
be destined to bring us back into a finer region 
of it. 

KNOWLEDGE AND UNHAPPINESS. 

It is not knowledge that makes us unhappy 
as we grow up, but the knowledge of unhappi- 
ness. Yet as unhappiness existed when we knew 
it not, it becomes us all to be acquainted with 
it, that we may all have the chance of bettering 
the condition of our species. Who would say 
to himself, " I would be happy, though all my 
fellow-creatures were miserable !" Knowledge 
must heal what it wounds, and extend the hap- 
piness which it has suspended. It must do by 
our comfort as a friend may do by one's books ; 
enrich it with its comments. One man grows 
up and gets unhealthy without knowledge ; 
another, with it. The former suffers and 
does not know why. He is unhappy, and he 
sees unhappiness, but he can do nothing for 
himself or others. The latter suffers and dis- 
covers why. He suffers even more because he 
knows more ; but he learns also how to 
diminish suffering in others. He learns too to 
apply his knowledge to his own case ; and he 
sees, that as he himself suffers from the world's 
want of knowledge, so the progress of know- 
ledge would take away the world's sufferings 
and his own. The efforts to this end worry 
him perhaps, and make him sickly ; upon 
which, thinking is pronounced to be injurious 
to health. And it may be so under these 
circumstances. What then, if it betters the 
health of the many? But thinking may also 
teach him how to be healthier. A game of 
cricket on a green may do for him what no 
want of thought would have done : while on 
the other hand, if he shows a want of thought 
upon these points, the inference is easy : he is 
not so thinking a man as you took him for. 
Addison should have got on horseback, instead 
of walking up and down a room in his house, 
with a bottle of wine at each end of it. Shak- 
speare divided his time between town and 
country, and in the latter part of his life, built, 
and planted, and petted his daughter Susanna. 
Solomon in his old age played the Anacreon ; 
and with Milton's leave, " his wisest heart" 
was not so much out in this matter, as when 
his royal impatience induced him to say that 
everything was vanity. 

CHILDHOOD — OLD AGE — OUR DESTINT. 

There appears to be something in the com- 
position of humanity like what we have ob- 
served in that of music. The musician's first 
thought is apt to be his finest : he must carry 
it on, and make a second part to his air ; and 
he becomes inferior. Nature in like manner 



THOUGHTS AND GUESSES ON HUMAN NATURE. 



23 



(if we may speak it without profaneness) ap- 
pears to succeed best in making childhood and 
youth. The symphony is a little perturbed ; but 
in what a sprightly manner the air sets off ! 
What purity ! What grace ! What touching 
simplicity ! Then comes sin, or the notion of 
it, and " breaks the fair music." Well did a 
wiser than the " wisest heart " bid us try and 
continue children. But there are foolish as 
well as wise children, and it is a special mark 
of the former, whether little or grown, to affect 
manhood, and to confound it with cunning and 
violence. — Do men die, in order that life aDd 
its freshness may be as often and as multitu- 
dinously renewed as possible ? Or do children 
grow old, that our consciousness may attain to 
some better mode of being through a rough 
path ? Superstition answers only to perplex us, 
and make us partial. Nature answers nothing. 
But nature's calm and resolute silence tells us 
at once to hope for the future, and to do our 
best to enjoy the present. What if it is the 
aim of her workmanship to produce self-moving 
instruments, that may carry forward their own 
good ? " A modest thought," you will say. 
Yet it is more allied to some" doctrines cele- 
brated for their humility, than you may suppose. 
Vanity,in speculations earnest and affectionate, 
is a charge to be made only by vanity. What 
has it to do with them ? 

ENDEAVOUR. 

Either this world (to use the style of Marcus 
Antoninus) is meant to be what it is, or it is not. 
If it is not, then our endeavours to render it 
otherwise are right : — if it is, then we must be 
as we are, and seek excitement through the 
same means, and our endeavours are still right. 
In either case, endeavour is good and useful ; 
but in one of them, the want of it must be a 
mistake. 

GOOD AND EVIL. 

Nature is justified (to speak humanly) in the 
ordinary state of the world, granting it is never 
to be made better, because the sum of good, 
upon the whole, is greater than that of evil. 
For in the list of goods we are not only to rank 
all the more obvious pleasures which we agree 
to call such, but much that is ranked under 
the head of mere excitement, taking hope for 
the ground of it, and action for the means. 
But we have no right on that account, to ab- 
stain from endeavouring to better the condition 
of our species, were it only for the sake of in- 
dividual suffering. Nature, who is infinite, has 
a right to act in the gross. Nothing but an in- 
finite suffering should make her stop ; and that 
should make her stop, were the individual who 
infinitely suffered the only inhabitant of his hell. 
Heaven and earth should petition to be abo- 
lished, rather than that one such monstrosity 
should exist : it is the absurdest as well as most 
impious of all the dreams of fear. To suppose 



that a Divine Being can sympathise with our 
happiness, is to suppose that he can sympathise 
with our misery ; but to suppose that he can 
sympathise with misery, and yet suffer infinite 
misery to exist, rather than put an end to 
misery and happiness together, is to contradict 
his sympathy with happiness, and to make him 
prefer a positive evil to a negative one, the 
existence of torment to the cessation of feeling. 
As nature therefore, if considered at all, must 
be considered as regulated in her operations, 
though infinite, we must look to fugitive suf- 
fering's nature must guard against permanent; 
she carves out our work for us in the gross : we 
must attend to it in the detail. To leave every 
thing to her, would be to settle into another 
mode of existence, or stagnate into death. 
If it be said that she will take care of us at 
all events, we answer, first, that she does not 
do so in the ordinary details of life, neither 
earns our food for us, nor washes our bodies, 
nor writes our books ; secondly, that of things 
useful-looking and uncertain, she incites us to 
know the profit and probability ; and thirdly 
(as we have hinted in a previous observation), 
that not knowing how far we may carry on the 
impulse of improvement, towards which she has 
given us a bias, it becomes us on every ground, 
both of ignorance and wisdom, to try. 

DEGRADING IDEAS OF DEITY. 

The superstitious, in their contradictory re- 
presentations of God, call him virtuous and 
benevolent out of the same passion of fear as 
induces them to make him such a tyrant. They 
think they shall be damned if they do not 
believe him the tyrant he is described : — they 
think they shall be damned also, if they do not 
gratuitously ascribe to him the virtues incom- 
patible with damnation. Being so unworthy of 
praise, they think he will be particularly angry 
at not being praised. They shudder to think 
themselves better ; and hasten to make amends 
for it, by declaring themselves as worthless as 
he is worthy. 

GREAT DISTINCTION TO BE MADE IN BIGOTS. 

There are two sorts of religious bigots, the 
unhealthy and the unfeeling. The fear of the 
former is mixed with humanity, and they never 
succeed in thinking themselves favourites of 
God, but their sense of security is embittered, 
by aversions which they dare not own to them- 
selves, and terror for the fate of those who are 
not so lucky. The unfeeling bigot is a mere 
unimaginative animal, whose thoughts are con- 
fined to the snugness of his kennel, and who 
would have a good one in the next world as 
well as in this. He secures a place in heaven 
as he does in the Manchester coach. Never 
mind who suffers outside, woman or child. 
We once found ourselves by accident on board 
a Margate hoy, which professed to " sail by 
Divine Providence." Walking about the deck 



24 



THE INDICATOR. 



at night to get rid of the chillness which would 
occasionally visit our devotions to the starry 
heavens and the sparkling sea, our foot came 
in contact with something white, which was 
lying gathered up in a heap. Upon stooping 
down, we found it to be a woman. The method- 
ists had secured all the beds below, and were 
not to be disturbed. 

SUPERSTITION THE FLATTERER OF REASON. 

"We are far from thinking that reason can 
settle everything. "We no more think so, than 
that our eyesight can see into all existence. 
But it does not follow, that we are to take for 
granted the extremest contradictions of reason. 
Why should we ? "We do not even think well 
enough of reason to do so. For here is one of 
the secrets of superstition. It is so angry at 
reason for not being able to settle everything, 
that it runs in despair into the arms of irratio- 
nality. 

GOOD IN THINGS EVIL. 

" God Almighty ! 
There is a soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out !" 

So, with equal wisdom and good-nature, does 
Shakspeare make one of his characters exclaim. 
Suffering gives strength to sympathy. Hate of 
the particular may have a foundation in love for 
the general. The lowest and most wilful vice may 
plunge deeper, out of a regret of virtue . Even in 
envy may be discerned something of an instinct 
of justice, something of a wish to see fair play, 
and things on a level. — " But there is still a re- 
siduum of evil, of which we should all wish to 
get rid." — "Well then, let us try. 

ARTIFICE OF EXAGGERATED COMPLAINT. 

Disappointment likes to make out bad to be 
worse, in order to relieve the gnawing of its 
actual wound. It would confuse the limits of 
its pain ; and by extending it too far, try to 
make itself uncertain how far it reached. 

CUSTOM, ITS SELF-RECONCILEMENTS AND CONTRA- 
DICTIONS. 

Custom is seen more in what we bear than 
what we enjoy. And yet a pain long borne 
so fits itself to our shoulders, that we do not 
miss even that without disquietude. The no- 
velty of the sensation startles us. Montaigne, 
like our modern beaux, was uneasy when he 
did not feel himself braced up in his clothing. 
Prisoners have been known to wish to go back 
to their prisons : invalids have missed the ac- 
companiment of a gun-shot wound ; and the 
world is angry with reformers and innovators, 
not because it is in the right, but because it is 
accustomed to be in the wrong. This is a good 
thing, and shows the indestructible tendency 
of nature to forego its troubles. But then re- 
formers and innovators must arise upon that 
very ground. To quarrel with them upon a 
principle of avowed spleen, is candid, and has 



a self-knowledge in it. But to resent them as 
impertinent or effeminate, is at bottom to 
quarrel with the principle of one's own patience, 
and to set the fear of moving above the courage 
of it. 

ADVICE. 

It has been well observed, that advice is not 
disliked because it is advice; but because so 
few people know how to give it. Yet there 
are people vain enough to hate it in proportion 
to its very agreeableness. 

HAPPINESS, HOW WE FOREGO IT. 

By the same reason for which we call this 
earth a vale of tears, we might call heaven, 
when we got there, a hill of sighs ; for upon 
the principle of an endless progression of 
beatitude, we might find a still better heaven 
promised us, and this would be enough to make 
us dissatisfied with the one in possession. Sup- 
pose that we have previously existed in the 
planet Mars ; that there are no fields or trees 
there, and that we nevertheless could imagine 
them, and were in the habit of anticipating 
their delight in the next world. Suppose that 
there was no such thing as a stream of air,— as 
a wind fanning one's face for a summer's day. 
"What a romantic thing to fancy ! What a 
beatitude to anticipate! Suppose, above all, 
that there was no such thing as love. Words 
would be lost in anticipating that. " Eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard," &c. Yet when we 
got to this heaven of green fields and fresh 
airs, we might take little notice of either for 
want of something more ; and even love we 
might contrive to spoil pretty odiously. 



LI.— THE HAMADRYAD*. 

An Assyrian, of the name of Rhaecus, ob- 
serving a fine old oak-tree ready to fall with 
age, ordered it to be propped up. He was con 
tinuing his way through the solitary skirts of 
the place, when a female of more than human 
beauty appeared before him, with gladness in 
her eyes. " Rhaecus," said she, " I am the 
Nymph of the tree which you have saved from 
perishing. My life is, of course, implicated in 
its own. But for you, my existence must have 
terminated ; but for you, the sap would have 
ceased to flow through its boughs, and the god- 
like essence I received from it to animate these 
veins. No more should I have felt the wind 
in my hair, the sun upon my cheeks, or the 
balmy rain upon my body. Now I shall feel 
them many years to come. Many years also 
will your fellow-creatures sit under my shade, 
and hear the benignity of my whispers, and 
repay me with their honey and their thanks. 
Ask what I can give you, Rhaecus, and you 
shall have it." 

* See the Scholiast upon Apollonius Rhodius, or the 
Mythology of Natalis Comes. 



THE NURTURE OF TRIPTOLEMUS. 



25 



The young man, who had done a graceful 
action but had not thought of its containing so 
many kindly things, received the praises of the 
Nymph with a due mixture of surprise and 
homage. He did not want courage, however ; 
and emboldened by her tone and manner, and 
still more by a beauty which had all the buxom 
bloom of humanity in it, with a preternatural 
gracefulness besides, he requested that she 
would receive him as a lover. There was a 
look in her face at this request answering to 
modesty, but something still finer ; having no 
guilt, she seemed to have none of the common 
infirmities either of shame or impudence. In 
fine, she consented to reward Rhsecus as he 
wished ; and said she would send a bee to 
inform him of the hour of their meeting. 

Who now was so delighted as Rhsecus ! for 
he was a great admirer of the fair sex, and not 
a little proud of their admiring him in return ; 
and no human beauty, whom he had known, 
could compare with the Hamadryad. It must 
be owned, at the same time, that his taste for 
love and beauty was not of quite so exalted a 
description as he took it for. If he was fond 
of the fair sex, he was pretty nearly as fond of 
dice, and feasting and any other excitement 
which came in his way ; and, unluckily, he was 
throwing the dice that very noon when the bee 
came to summon him. 

Rhsecus was at an interesting part of the 
game — so much so, that he did not at first 
recognise the object of the bee's humming. 
"Confound this bee !" said he, "it seems plaguily 
fond of me." He brushed it away two or three 
times, but the busy messenger returned, and 
only hummed the louder. At last he bethought 
him of the Nymph ; but his impatience seemed 
to increase with his pride, and he gave the 
poor insect such a brush, as sent him away 
crippled in both his thighs. 

The bee returned to his mistress as well as 
he could, and shortly after was followed by his 
joyous assailant, who came triumphing in the 
success of his dice and his gallantry. " I am 
here," said the Hamadryad. Rhsecus looked 
among the trees, but could see nobody. " I 
am here," said a grave sweet voice, "right 
before you." Rhsecus saw nothing. " Alas !" 
said she, " Rhsecus, you cannot see me, nor will 
you see me more. I had thought better of 
your discernment and your kindness ; but you 
were but gifted with a momentary sight of me. 
You will see nothing in future but common 
things, and those sadly. You are struck blind 
to everything else. The hand that could strike 
my bee with a lingering death, and prefer the 
embracing of the dice-box to that of affec- 
tionate beauty, is not worthy of love and the 
green trees." 

The wind sighed off to a distance, and 
Rhaecus felt that he was alone 



LIL— THE NURTURE OF TRIPTOLEMUS. 

Triptolemus was the son of Celeus, king 
of Attica, by his wife Polymnia. During his 
youth he felt such an ardour for knowledge, 
and such a desire to impart it to his fellow- 
creatures, that, having but a slight frame for 
so vigorous a soul, and meeting with a great 
deal of jealousy and envy from those who were 
interested in being thought wiser, he fell into 
a wasting illness. His flesh left his bones ; 
his thin hands trembled when he touched the 
harp ; his fine warm eyes looked staringly out 
of their sockets, like stars that had slipped out 
of their places in heaven. 

At this period, an extraordinary and awful 
sensation struck, one night, through the streets 
of Eleusis. It was felt both by those who 
slept and those who were awake. The former 
dreamed great dreams ; the latter, especially 
the revellers and hypocrites who were pur- 
suing their profane orgies, looked at one 
another, and thought of Triptolemus. As to 
Triptolemus himself, he shook in his bed with 
exceeding agitation ; but it was with a plea- 
sure that overcame him like pain. He knew 
not how to account for it ; but he begged his 
father to go out and meet whatever was 
coming. He felt that some extraordinary 
good was approaching, both for himself and 
his fellow-creatures ; but revenge was never 
farther from his thoughts. What was he to 
revenge ? Mistake and unhappiness ? He was 
too wise, too kind, and too suffering. " Alas !" 
thought he, "an unknown joy shakes me like 
a palpable sorrow ; and their minds are but as 
weak as my body. They cannot bear a touch 
they are not accustomed to." 

The king, his wife, and his daughters went 
out, trembling, though not so much as Tripto- 
lemus, nor with the same feeling. There was 
a great light in the air, which moved gradually 
towards them, and seemed to be struck upwards 
from something in the street. Presently, two 
gigantic torches appeared round the corner ; 
and underneath them, sitting in a car, and 
looking earnestly about, was a mighty female, 
of more than ordinary size and beauty. Her 
large black eyes, with her gigantic brows bent 
over them, and surmounted with a white fore- 
head and a profusion of hair, looked here and 
therewith an intentness and a depth of yearning 
indescribable. " Chaire, Demeter!" exclaimed 
the king in a loud voice : — " Hail, creative 
mother !" He raised the cry common at fes- 
tivals, when they imagined a deity manifesting 
itself; and the priests poured out of their 
dwellings, with vestment and with incense, 
which they held tremblingly aloft, turning 
down their pale faces from the gaze of the 
passing goddess. 

It was Ceres, looking for her lost daughter 
Proserpina. The eye of the deity seemed to 
have a greater severity in its earnestness, as 



2t> 



THE INDICATOR. 



she passed by the priests ; but at sight of a 
chorus of youths and damsels, who dared to 
lift up their eyes as well as voices, she gave 
such a beautiful smile as none but gods in 
sorrow can give ; and emboldened with this, 
the king and his family prayed her to accept 
their hospitality. 

She did so. A temple in the king's palace 
was her chamber, where she lay on the golden 
bed usually assigned to her image. The most 
precious fruits and perfumes burned constantly 
at the door ; and at first, no hymns were sung, 
but those of homage and condolence. But 
these the goddess commanded to be changed 
for happier songs. Word was also given to 
the city, that it should remit its fears and its 
cares, and show all the happiness of which it 
was capable before she arrived. " For," said 
she, " the voice of happiness arising from earth 
is a god's best incense. A deity lives better 
on the pleasure of what it has created, than in 
a return of a part of its gifts." 

Such were the maxims which Ceres delighted 
to utter during her abode at Eleusis, and which 
afterwards formed the essence of her renowned 
mysteries at that place. But the bigots, who 
adopted and injured them, heard them with 
dismay ; for they were similar to what young 
Triptolemus had uttered in the aspirations of 
his virtue. The rest of the inhabitants gave 
themselves up to the joy, from which the divinity 
would only extract consolation. They danced, 
they wedded, they loved ; they praised her in 
hymns as cheerful as her natural temper ; they 
did great and glorious things for one another : 
never was Attica so full of delight and heroism : 
the young men sought every den and fearful 
place in the territory, to see if Proserpina was 
there ; and the damsels vied who should give 
them most kisses for their reward. " Oh 
Dearest and Divinest Mother !" sang the Eleu- 
sinians, as they surrounded the king's palace 
at night with their evening hymn, — " Oh 
greatest and best goddess ! who, not above 
sorrow thyself, art yet above all wish to inflict 
it, we know by this thou art indeed divine. 
Would that we might restore thee thy beloved 
daughter, thy daughter Proserpina, the dark, 
the beautiful, the mother-loving ; whom some 
god less generous than thyself would keep 
for his own jealous doating. Would we might 
see her in thine arms ! We would willingly die 
for the sight ; would willingly die with the only 
pleasure which thou hast left wanting to us." 

The goddess would weep at these twilight 
hymns, consoling herself for the absence of 
Proserpina by thinking how many daughters 
she had made happy. Triptolemus shed weaker 
tears at them in his secret bed, but they were 
happier ones than before. " I shall die," 
thought he, "merely from the bitter-sweet joy 
of seeing the growth of a happiness which I 
must never taste ; but the days I longed for 
have arrived. Would that my father would 



only speak to the goddess, that my passage to 
the grave might be a little easier !" 

The father doubted whether he should speak 
to the goddess. He loved his son warmly, 
though he did not well understand him ; and 
the mother, in spite of the deity's kindness, was 
afraid, lest in telling her of a child whom they 
were about to lose, they should remind her too 
forcibly of her own. Yet the mother, in an 
agony of alarm one day, at a fainting-fit of her 
son's, was the first to resolve to speak to her, 
and the king and she went and prostrated 
themselves at her feet. " What is this, kind 
hosts?" said Ceres, "have ye, too, lost a 
daughter?" "No; but we shall lose a son," 
answered the parents, "but for the help of 
heaven." " A son !" replied Ceres, " why did 
you not tell me your son was living ? I had 
heard of him, and wished to see him ; but 
finding him not among ye, I fancied that he 
was no more, and I would not trouble you with 
such a memory. But why did you fear mine, 
when I could do good ? Did your son fear it?" 
— " No, indeed," said the parents ; " he urged 
us to tell thee." — " He is the being I took him 
for," returned the goddess : " lead me to where 
he lies." 

They came to his chamber, and found him 
kneeling upon .the bed, his face and joined 
hands bending towards the door. He had felt 
the approach of the deity ; and though he 
shook in every limb, it was a transport beyond 
fear that made him rise — it was love and gra- 
titude. The goddess saw it, and bent on him 
a look that put composure into his feelings. 
"What wantest thou," said she, "straggler 
with great thoughts?" "Nothing," answered 
Triptolemus, "if thou thinkest good, but a 
shorter and easier death." 

" What ! before thy task is done ?" " Fate," 
he replied, " seems to tell me that I was not 
fitted for my task, and it is more than done, 
since thou art here. I pray thee, let me die ; 
that I may not see every one around me weep- 
ing in the midst of joy, and yet not have 
strength enough left in my hands to wipe away 
their tears." " Not so, my child," said the god- 
dess, and her grand harmonious voice had tears 
in it as she spoke ; " not so, Triptolemus ; for 
my task is thy task ; and gods work with instru- 
ments. Thou hast not gone through all thy 
trials yet ; but thou shalt have a better cover- 
ing to bear them, yet still by degrees. Gra- 
dual sorrow, gradual joy." 

So saying, she put her hand to his heart and 
pressed it, and the agitation of his spirit was 
further allayed, though he returned to his 
reclining posture for weakness. From that 
time the bed of Triptolemus was removed into 
the temple, and Ceres became his second 
mother ; but nobody knew how she nourished 
him. It was said that she summoned milk into 
her bosom, and nourished him at her immortal 
heart ; but he did not grow taller in stature, 



THE NURTURE OF TRIPTOLEMUS. 



as men expected. His health was restored, 
his joints were knit again, and stronger than 
ever ; but he continued the same small, though 
graceful youth, only the sicklier particles 
which he had received from his parents with- 
drew their influence. 

At last, however, his very figure began to 
grow and expand. Up to this moment he had 
only been an interesting mortal, in whom the 
stoutest and best-made of his father's subjects 
recognised something mentally superior. Now, 
he began to look in person, as well as in mind, 
a demigod. The curiosity of the parents was 
roused at this appearance ; and it was height- 
ened by the report of a domestic, who said, 
that in passing the door of the temple one night, 
she heard a sound as of a mighty fire. But their 
parental feelings were also excited by the beha- 
viour of Triptolemus, who while he seemed to 
rise with double cheerfulness in the morning, 
always began to look melancholy towards night. 
For some hours before heretired to rest he grew 
silent, and looked more and more thoughtful, 
though nothing could be kinder in his manners 
to everybody, and the hour no sooner ap- 
proached for his retiring, than he went instantly 
and even cheerfully. 

His parents resolved to watch ; they knew 
not what they were about, or they would have 
abstained, for Ceres was every night at her 
enchantments, to render their son immortal 
in essence as well as in fame, and interruption 
would be fatal. At midnight they listened at 
the temple door. 

The first thing they heard was the roaring 
noise of fire, as had been reported. It was 
deep and fierce. They were about to retire 
for fear ; but curiosity and parental feeling 
prevailed. They listened again ; but for some 
time heard nothing but the fire. At last a 
voice resembling their child's, gave a deep 
groan. " It was a strong trial, my son," said 
another voice, in which they recognised the 
melancholy sweetness of the goddess. " The 
grandeur and exceeding novelty of these 
visions," said the fainter voice, "press upon 
me, as though they would bear down my brain." 
" But they do not," returned the deity, a and 
they have not. I will summon the next." 
" Nay, not yet," rejoined the mortal ; " yet be 
it as thou wilt. I know what thou tellest me, 
great and kind mother." — " Thou dost know," 
said the goddess, "and thou knowest in the 
very heart of thy knowledge, which is in the 
sympathy of it and the love. Thou seest 
that difference is not difference, and yet it is 
so ; that the same is not the same, and yet 
must be ; that what is, is but what we see, 
and as we see it ; and yet that all which we 
see, is. Thou shalt prove it finally ; and this 
is the last trial but one. Vision, come forth." 
A noise here took place, as of the entrance of 
something exceedingly hurried and agonised, 
but which remained fixed with equal stillness. 



A brief pause took place, at the end of which 
the listeners heard their son speak, but in a 
voice of exceeding toil and loathing, and as if 
he had turned away his head : — " It is," said 
he, gasping for breath, " utmost deformity," — 
" Only to thine habitual eyes, and when alone," 
said the goddess in a soothing manner ; u look 
again." "O my heart!" said the same voice, 
gasping, as if with transport, " they are perfect 
beauty and humanity." " They are only two 
of the same," said the goddess, "each going 
out of itself. Deformity to the eyes of habit 
is nothing but analysis ; in essence it is nothing 
but one-ness, if such a thing there be. The 
touch and the result is everything. See what 
a goddess knows, and see nevertheless what 
she feels : in this only greater than mortals, 
that she lives for ever to do good. Now comes 
the last and greatest trial ; now shalt thou see 
the real worlds as they are; now shalt thou 
behold them lapsing in reflected splendour 
about the blackness of space ; now shalt thou 
dip thine ears into the mighty ocean of their 
harmonies, and be able to be touched with the 
concentrated love of the universe. Roar hea- 
vier, fire ; endure, endure, thou immortalising 
frame." "Yes, now, now," said the other 
voice, in a superhuman tone, which the listen- 
ers knew not whether to think joy or anguish ; 
but they were seized with such alarm and 
curiosity, that they opened a place from which 
the priestess used to speak at the lintel, and 
looked in. The mother beheld her son, 
stretched, with a face of bright agony, upon 
burning coals. She shrieked, and pitch dark- 
ness fell upon the temple. "A little while," 
said the mournful voice of the goddess, " and 
heaven had had another life. O Fear ! what 
dost thou not do ! O ! my all but divine 
boy !" continued she, "now plunged again into 
physical darkness, thou canst not do good so 
long as thou wouldst have done ; but thou 
shalt have a life almost as long as the common- 
est sons of men, and a thousand times more 
useful and glorious. Thou must change away 
the rest of thy particles, as others do ; and in 
the process of time they may meet again under 
some nature worthy of thee, and give thee 
another chance for yearning into immortality ; 
but at present the pain is done, the pleasure 
must not arrive." 

The fright they had undergone slew the weak 
parents. Triptolemus, strong in body, cheerful 
to all in show, cheerful to himself in many 
things, retained, nevertheless, a certain melan- 
choly from his recollections, but it did not hin- 
der him from sowing joy wherever he went. It 
incited him but the more to do so. The success 
of others stood him instead of his own. Ceres 
gave him the first seeds of the corn that makes 
bread, and sent him in her chariot round the 
world, to teach men how to use it. " I am not 
immortal myself," said he, " but let the good I 
do be so, and I shall yet die happy." 



28 



THE INDICATOR. 



LIIL— ON COMMENDATORY VERSES. 

If the faculties of the writer of these papers 
are any thing at all, they are social ; and we 
have always been most pleased when we have 
received the approbation of those friends, whom 
we are most in the habit of thinking of when 
we write. There are multitudes of readers 
whose society we can fancy ourselves enjoying, 
though we have never seen them ; but we are 
more particularly apt to imagine ourselves m 
such and such company, according to the nature 
of our articles. We are accustomed to say to 
ourselves, if we happen to strike off any thing 
that pleases us, — K. will like that : — There's 
something for M. or R. : — C. will snap his finger 
and slap his knee at this : — Here's a crow to 
pick for H. — Here N. will shake his shoulders : 
— There B., his head : — Here S. will shriek 
with satisfaction : — L. will see the philosophy 
of this joke, if nobody else does. — As to our 
fair friends, we find it difficult to think of them 
and our subject together. We fancy their 
countenances looking so frank and kind over 
our disquisitions, that we long to have them 
turned towards ourselves instead of the paper. 

Every pleasure we could experience in a 
friend's approbation, we have felt in receiving 
the following verses. They are from a writer, 
who of all other men, knows how to extricate a 
common thing from commonness, and to give 
it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and 
wisdom. We knew him directly, in spite of 
his stars. His hand as well as heart betrayed 
him. 

TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR. 
Your easy Essays indicate a flow, 
Dear Friend, of brain, which we may elsewhere seek ; 
And to their pages I, and hundreds, owe, 
That Wednesday is the sweetest of the week. 
Such observation, wit, and sense, are shown, 
We think the days of Bickerstaff return'd ; 
And that a portion of that oil you own, 
In his undying midnight lamp which burn'd. 
I would not lightly bruise old Priscian's head, 
Or wrong the rules of grammar understood ; 
But, with the leave of Priscian be it said, 
The Indicative is your Potential Mood. 
Wit, poet, prose-man, party-man, translator — 

H , your best title yet is Indicator. 

* * * * 

The receipt of these verses has set us upon 
thinking of the good-natured countenance 
which men of genius, in all ages, have for the 
most part shown to contemporary writers ; and 
thence by a natural transition, of the generous 
friendship they have manifested for each other. 
Authors, like other men, may praise as well as 
blame for various reasons; for interest, for 
vanity, for fear : and for the same reasons they 
may be silent. But generosity is natural to the 
humanity and the strength of genius. Where 
it is obscured, it is usually from something 
that has rendered it misanthropical. Where 
it is glaringly deficient, the genius is deficient 
in proportion. And the defaulter feels as much, 



though he does not know it. He feels, that 
the least addition to another's fame threatens 
to block up the view of his own. 

At the same time, praise by no means im- 
plies a sense of superiority. It may imply that 
we think it worth having ; but this may arise 
from a consciousness of our sincerity, and from 
a certain instinct we have, that to relish any- 
thing exceedingly gives us a certain ability to 
judge, as well as a right to express our admira- 
tion, of it. 

On all these accounts, we were startled to 
hear the other day that Shakspeare had never 
praised a contemporary author. We had me- 
chanically given him credit for the manifes- 
tation of every generosity under the sun ; and 
we found the surprise affect us, not as authors 
(which would have been a vanity not even 
warranted by our having the title in common 
with him), but as men. What baulked us in 
Shakspeare seemed to baulk our faith in hu- 
manity. But we recovered as speedily. Shak- 
speare had none of the ordinary inducements, 
which make men niggardly of their commen- 
dation. He had no reason either to be jealous 
or afraid. He was the reverse of unpopular. 
His own claims were allowed. He was neither 
one who need be silent about a friend, lest he 
should be hurt by his enemy ; nor one who 
nursed a style or a theory by himself, and so 
was obliged to take upon him a monopoly of 
admiration in self-defence ; nor was he one 
who should gaze himself blind to every thing 
else, in the complacency of his shallowness. 
If it should be argued, that he who saw through 
human nature was not likely to praise it, we 
answer, that he who saw through it as Shak- 
speare did was the likeliest man in the world 
to be kind to it. Even Swift refreshed the 
bitterness of his misanthropy in his love for 
Tom, Dick, and Harry; and what Swift did 
from impatience at not finding men better, 
Shakspeare would do out of patience in finding 
them so good. We instanced the sonnet in 
the collection called the Passionate Pilgrim, be- 
ginning 

If music and sweet poetry agree, 

in which Spenser is praised so highly. It was 
replied, that minute inquirers considered that 
collection as apocryphal. This set us upon 
looking again at the biographers who have 
criticised it ; and we see no reason, for the 
present, to doubt its authenticity. For some 
parts of it we would answer upon internal evi- 
dence, especially, for instance, the Lover's Com- 
plaint. There are two lines in this poem which 
would alone announce him. They have the 
very trick of his eye : 

O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies 
In the small orb of one particular tear ! 

But inquirers would have to do much more 
than disprove the authenticity of these poems, 
before they made out Shakspeare to be a grudg- 



ON COMMENDATORY VERSES. 



29 



ing author. They would have to undo the 
modesty and kindliness of his other writings. 
They would have to undo his universal charac- 
ter for " gentleness," at a time when gentle 
meant all that was noble as well as mild. They 
would have to deform and to untune all that 
round, harmonious mind, which a great con- 
temporary described as the very "sphere of 
humanity;" to deprive him of the epithet given 
him in the school of Milton, " unvulgar ;" * to 
render the universality of wisdom liable to the 
same drawbacks as the mere universality of 
i science ; to take the child's heart out of the 
true man's body ; to un-Shakspeare Shak- 
speare. If Shakspeare had never mentioned a 
contemporary in his life, nor given so many 
• evidences of a cordial and admiring sense of 
' those about him, we would sooner believe that 
sheer modesty had restrained his tongue, than 
the least approach to a petty feeling. We can 
believe it possible that he may have thought 
his panegyrics not wanted ; but unless he de- 
graded himself wilfully, in order to be no better 
than any of his fellow-creatures, we cannot 
believe it possible, that he would have thought 
his panegyrics desired, and yet withheld them. 
It is remarkable that one of the most regular 
contributors of Commendatory Verses in the 
time of Shakspeare, was a man whose bluntness 
of criticism and feverish surliness of manners 
have rendered the most suspected of a jealous 
grudgingness ; — Ben Jonson. We mean not to 
detract from the good-heartedness which we 
believe this eminent person to have possessed 
at bottom, when we say, that as an excess of 
modest confidence in his own generous instincts 
might possibly have accounted for the sparing- 
ness of panegyric in our great dramatist, so a 
noble distrust of himself, and a fear lest jealousy 
should get the better of his instincts, might 
possibly aceount for Ben Jonson's tendency to 
distribute his praises around him. If so, it 
shows how useful such a distrust is to one's 
ordinary share of humanity ; and how much 
safer it will be for us, on these as well as all 
other occasions, to venture upon likening our- 
selves to Ben Jonson than to Shakspeare. It 
is to be recollected at the same time, that Ben 
Jonson, in his old age, was the more prominent 
person of the two, as a critical bestower of 
applause ; that he occupied the town-chair of 
wit and scholarship ; and was in the habit of 
sanctioning the pretensions of new authors by 
a sort of literary adoption, calling them his 
" sons," and " sealing them of the tribe of Ben." 
There was more in him of the aristocracy and 
heraldry of letters, than in Shakspeare, who, 
after all, seems to have been careless of fame 
himself, and to have written nothing during 
the chief part of his life but plays which he did 
not print. Ben Jonson, among other panegy- 

* By Milton's nephew Phillips, in his Theatrum Poeta- 
rum. It is an epithet given in all the spirit which it 
attributes. 



rics, wrote high and affectionate ones upon 
Drayton, William Browne, Fletcher and Beau- 
mont. His verses to the memory of Shakspeare 
are a noble monument to both of them. The 
lines to Beaumont in answer for some of which 
we have formerly quoted, we must repeat. 
They are delightful for a certain involuntary 
but manly fondness, and for the candour with 
which he confesses the joy he received from 
such commendation. 

How do I love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse 
That unto me dost such religion use ! 
How do I fear myself, that am not worth 
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth ! 
At once thou mak'st me happy, and unmak'st : 
And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st ! 
What fate is mine, that so itself bereaves ? 
What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives? 
When even there, where most thou praisest me, 
For writing better, I must envy thee. 

Observe the good effect which the use of the 
word "religion" has here, though somewhat 
ultra-classical and pedantic. A certain pedan- 
try, in the best sense of the term, was natural 
to the author, and throws a grace on his most 
natural moments. 

There is great zeal and sincerity in Ben 
Jonson's lines to Fletcher, on the ill-success of 
his Faithful Shepherdess ; but we have not room 
for them. 

Beaumont's are still finer ; and indeed furnish 
a complete specimen of his wit and sense, as 
well as his sympathy with his friend. His in- 
dignation against the critics is more composed 
and contemptuous. His uppermost feeling is 
confidence in his friend's greatness. The reader 
may here see what has always been thought by 
men of genius, of people who take the ipse dibits 
of the critics. After giving a fine sense of the 
irrepressible' thirst of writing in a poet, he says. 

Yet wish I those whom I for friends have known, 
To sing their thoughts to no ears but their own. 
Why should the man, whose wit ne'er had a stain, 
Upon the public stage present his vein, 
And make a thousand men in judgment sit, 
To call in question his undoubted wit, 
Scarce two of which can understand the laws 
Which they should judge by, nor the party's cause ? 
Among the rout there is not one that hath 
In his own censure an explicit faith. 
One company, knowing they judgment lack, 
Ground their belief on the next man in black ; 
Others, on him that makes signs, and is mute ; 
Some like as he does in the fairest suit ; 
He as his mistress doth, and she by chance : 
Nor want there those, who as the boy doth dance 
Between the acts, will censure the whole play ; 
Some if the wax-lights be not new that day ; 
But multitudes there are whose judgment goes 
Headlong according to the actor's clothes. 
For this, these public things and I, agree 
So ill, that but to do a right for thee, 
I had not been persuaded to have hurl'd 
These few, ill-spoken lines, into the world, 
Both to be read, and censured of, by those, 
Whose very reading makes verse senseless prose. 

One of the finest pieces of commendatory 
verse is Sir Walter Raleigh's upon the great 



30 



THE INDICATOR. 



poem of Spenser. He calls it " A Vision upon 
the Faery Queen." 

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, 
Within that temple where the vestal flame 
Was wont to bum : and passing by that way 
To see that buried dust of living fame, 
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept, 
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen : 
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept, 
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen 
(For they this Queen attended) ; in whose stead 
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. 
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, 
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse, 
Where Homer's sprite did tremble all for grief, 
And curst the' access of that celestial thief. 

This is highly imaginative and picturesque. 
We fancy ourselves in one of the most beauti- 
ful places of Italian sepulture — quiet and 
hushing — looking upon a tomb of animated 
sculpture. It is the tomb of the renowned 
Laura. We feel the spirit of Petrarch present, 
without being visible. The fair forms of Love 
and Virtue keep watch over the marble. All 
on a sudden, from out the dusk of the chapel 
door, the Faery Queen is beheld approaching 
the tomb. The soul of Petrarch is heard 
weeping; — an intense piece of fancy, which 
affects one like the collected tears and disap- 
pointment of living humanity. Oblivion lays 
him down on the tomb ; 

And from thenceforth those giaces were not seen. 

The other marbles bleed at this : the ghosts of 
the dead groan : and the very spirit of Homer 
is felt to tremble. It is a very grand and high 
sonnet, worthy of the dominant spirit of the 
writer. One of its beauties however is its de- 
fect ; if defect it be, and not rather a fine 
instance of the wilful. Comparisons between 
great reputations are dangerous, and are apt 
to be made too much at the expense of one of 
them, precisely because the author knows he 
is begging the question. Oblivion has laid him 
down neither on Laura's hearse nor the Faery 
Queen's ; and Raleigh knew he never would. 
But he wished to make out a case for his friend, 
in the same spirit in which he pushed his 
sword into a Spanish settlement and carried all 
before him. 

The verses of Andrew Marvell prefixed to 
Paradise Lost, beginning, 

When I beheld the poet, blind yet bold, 

are well known to every reader of Milton, and 
justly admired by all who know what they 
read. We remember how delighted we were 
to find who Andrew Marvell was, and that he 
could be pleasant and lively as well as grave. 
Spirited and worthy as this panegyric is, the 
reader who is not thoroughly acquainted with 
Marvell's history, does not know all its spirit 
and worth. That true friend and excellent 
patriot stuck to his old acquaintance, at a 
period when canters and time-servers had 



turned their backs upon him, and when they 
would have made the very knowledge of him, 
which they had had the honour of sharing, the 
ruin of those that put their desertion to the 
blush. There is a noble burst of indignation 
on this subject, in Marvell's prose works, 
against a fellow of the name of Parker, who 
succeeded in obtaining a bishopric. Parker 
seems to have thought, that Marvell would 
have been afraid of acknowledging his old 
acquaintance ; but so far from resembling the 
bishop in that or any other particular, he not 
only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the 
friendship of the poet, but reminded Master 
Parker that he had once done the same. 

We must be cautious how we go on quoting 
verses upon this agreeable subject ; for they 
elbow one's prose out at a great rate. They 
sit in state, with a great vacancy on each side 
of them, like Henry the Eighth in a picture of 
Holbein's. The wits who flourished in the 
time of the Stuarts and Queen Anne were not 
behind the great poets of the age of Elizabeth, 
in doing justice to their contemporaries. Dry- 
den hailed the appearance of Congreve and 
Oldham. Congreve's merits were universally 
acknowledged except by the critics. We need 
not refer to the works of Pope, Gay, Steele, 
Prior, &c. If Swift abused Dryden (who is 
said to have told him he would never be a 
poet), he also abused in a most unwarrantable 
and outrageous manner Sir Richard Steele, for 
whose Taller he had written. His abuse was 
not a thing of literary jealousy, but of some 
personal or party spite. The union of all three 
was a perfection of consciousness, reserved for 
the present times. But Swift's very fondness 
vented itself, like Buonaparte's, in slaps of the 
cheek. He was morbid, and liked to create 
himself cause for pity or regret. " The Dean 
was a strange man." According to Mrs. Pil- 
kington, he would give her a pretty hard 
thump now and then, of course to see how 
amiably she took it. Upon the same principle, 
he tells us in the verses on his death, that 

Friend Pope will grieve a month, and Gay 
A week, and Arbuthnot a day. 

This was to vex them, and make them prove 
his words false by complaining of their injus- 
tice. He himself once kept a letter unopened 
for some days, because he was afraid it con- 
tained news of a friend's death. See how he 
makes his very coarseness and irritability 
contribute to a panegyric : — 

When Pope shall in one couplet fix 
More sense than I can do in six, 
It gives me such a jealous fit, 
I cry, " Pox take him and his wit !" 

We must finish our quotations with a part 
of some sprightly verses addressed to Garth 
on his Dispensary, by a friend of the name of 
Codrington. Codrington was one of those 
happily-tempered spirits, who united the cha- 



A WORD UPON INDEXES. 



31 



racters of the gentleman, the wit, and the man 
of business. He was, in the best sense of the 
words, " a person of wit and honour about town," 

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eye, tongue, sword. 

He was born in Barbadoes, and after residing 
some time in England, and serving with great 
gallantry as an officer in various parts of the 
world, became Governor-General of the Lee- 
ward Islands. He resigned his government in 
the course of a few years, and died in Barbadoes 
in the midst of his favourite studies. Among 
the variety of his accomplishments he did not 
omit divinity ; and he was accounted a master 
of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted 
to his country ; his private he divided among 
his books and friends. If the verses before us 
are not so good as those of the old poets, they 
are as good in their way, are as sincere and 
cordial, and smack of the champagne on his 
table. "We like them on many accounts, for 
we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking 
for his friend — we like the taste they express 
in friendship and in beauty ; and we like to 
fancy that our good-humoured ancestors in 
Barbadoes enjoyed the Governor's society, and 
relished their wine with these identical triplets. 

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION 
OF HIS POEM. 
Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame ; 
Perhaps I know not what I like or damn ; 
I can be pleased, and I dare own I am. 

I read thee over with a lover's eye ; 

Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy ; 

Thou art all beauty, or all blindness I. 

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste, 
Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past, 
Must judge by rules what they want force to taste. 

I would a poet, like a mistress, try, 

Not by her hair, her hand, her nose, her eye ; 

But by some nameless power to give me joy. 

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms, 

If with resistless fires my soul she warms, 

With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her arms. 

Literary loves and jealousies were much the 
same in other ages as the present ; but we hear 
a great deal more of the loves than the reverse ; 
because genius survives, and ignorance does 
not. The ancient philosophers had a delicate 
way of honouring their favourites, by inscribing 
treatises with their names. It is thought a 
strange thing in Xenophon that he never 
mentions Plato. The greater part of the mis- 
cellaneous poetry of the Greeks is lost ; or we 
should doubtless see numerous evidences of 
the intercourse of their authors. The Greek 
poets of Sicily, Theocritus and Moschus, are 
affectionate in recording the merits of their 
contemporaries. Varius and Gallus, two emi- 
nent Roman poets, scarcely survive but in the 
panegyrics of their contemporaries. Dante 
notices his, and his predecessors. Petrarch and 
Boccaccio publicly honoured, as they privately 



loved one another. Tasso, the greatest poet 
of his time, was also the greatest panegyrist ; 
and so, as might be expected, was Ariosto. 
The latter has introduced a host of his friends 
by name, male and female, at the end of his 
great work, coming down to the shores of 
poetry to welcome him home after his voyage. 
There is a pleasant imitation of it by Gay, 
applied to Pope's conclusion of Homer. Mon- 
taigne, who had the most exalted notions of 
friendship, which he thought should have every 
thing in common, took as much zeal in the 
literary reputation of his friends, as in every 
thing else that concerned them. The wits of 
the time of Henry the Fourth, of Louis the 
Fourteenth, and of Louis the Fifteenth, — 
Malherbe, Racan, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, 
Chaulieu, La Fare, D'Alembert, Voltaire, &c, 
not excepting Boileau, where he was personally 
intimate with a brother author — all do honour 
in this respect to the sociality of their nation. 
It is the same, we believe, with the German 
writers ; and if the Spanish winced a little 
under the domination of Lope de Vega, they 
were chivalrous in giving him perhaps more 
than his due. Camoens had the admiration 
of literary friends as poor as himself, if he had 
nothing else ; but this was something. 



LIV.— A WORD UPON INDEXES. 

Index-making has been held to be the 
driest as well as lowest species of writing. We 
shall not dispute the humbleness of it ; but 
since we have had to make an index ourselves,* 
we have discovered that the task need not be 
so very dry. Calling to mind indexes in 
general, we found them presenting us a variety 
of pleasant memories and contrasts. We 
thought of those to the Spectator, which we 
used to look at so often at school, for the sake 
of choosing a paper to abridge. We thought 
of the index to the Pantheon of Fabulous 
Histories of the Heathen Gods, which we used 
to look at oftener. We remember how we 
imagined we should feel some day, if ever our 
name should appear in the list of Hs ; as thus, 
Home, Howard, Hume, Huniades, — — . The 
poets would have been better, but then the 
names, though perhaps less unfitting, were not 
so flattering; as for instance, Halifax, Ham- 
mond, Harte, Hughes, . We did not like 

to come after Hughes. 

We have just been looking at the indexes to 
the Tatler and Spectator, and never were more 
forcibly struck with the feeling we formerly 
expressed about a man's being better pleased 
with other writers than with himself. Our 
index seemed the poorest and most second- 
hand thing in the world after theirs ; but let 
any one read theirs, and then call an index a 
dry thing if he can. As there "is a soul of 
* To the original edition of the Indicator. 



32 



THE INDICATOR. 



goodness in things evil," so there is a soul of 
humour in things dry, and in things dry by 
profession. Lawyers know this, as well as 
index-makers, or they would die of sheer thirst 
and aridity. But as grapes, ready to burst 
with wine, issue out of the most stony places, 
like jolly fellows bringing Burgundy out of a 
cellar ; so an index, like the Tatler's, often 
gives us a taste of the quintessence of his 
humour. For instance, — 

" Bickerstaff, Mr. account of his ancestors, 
141. How his race was improved, 142. Not 
in partnership with Lillie, 250. Catched writing 
nonsense, 47. 

" Dead men, who are to be so accounted, 247." 

Sometimes he has a stroke of pathos, as 
touching in its brevity as the account it refers 
to ; as, 

" Love-letters between Mr. Bickerstaff and 
Maria, 184 — 186. Found in a grave, 289." 

Sometimes he is simply moral and graceful ; as, 

" Tenderness and humanity inspired by the 
Muses, 258. No true greatness of mind without 
it, ibid." 

At another he says perhaps more than he 
intended; as, 

il Laura, her perfections and excellent cha- 
racter, 19. Despised by her husband, ibid." 

The index to Cotton's Montaigne, probably 
written by the translator himself, is often pithy 
and amusing. Thus in Volume 2d, 

"Anger is pleased with, and flatters itself, 618. 

" Beasts inclined to avarice, 225. 

" Children abandoned to the care and govern- 
ment of their fathers, 613. 

" Drunkenness, to a high and dead degree, 16. 

"Joy, profound, has more severity than 
gaiety in it. 

" Monsters, are not so to God, 612. 

"Voluptuousness of the Cynics, 418." 

Sometimes we meet with graver quaintnesses 
and curious relations, as in the index to Sandys's 
Ovid 

" Diana, no virgin, scoft at by Lucian, p. 55. 

" Dwarfes, an Italian Dwarfe carried about 
in a parrot's cage, p. 113. 

" Eccho, atTwilleries in Paris,heard to repeat 
a verse without failing in one syllable, p. 58. 

" Ship of the Tyrrhenians miraculously stuck 
fast in the sea, p. 63. 

" A Historie of a Bristol ship stuck fast in 
thedeepe Sea by Witchcraft ; for which twen tie- 
five Witches were executed, ibid." 



LV.— AN OLD SCHOOL-BOOK. 

There is a school-book by the egregious 
John Amos Comenius, (who fixed the millen- 
nium for the year 1672) in which the learned 
author has lumped together, in a very singular 
way, all sorts of trades, pursuits, productions, 
merriments, and disasters. As every thing 
which is saleable is on a level with booksellers, 



so every thing which has a Latin word for it, 
was alike important to the creator of the 
Orbis Pictus: for so the book is called. 

He sees with equal eye, as construing all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall. 

The Tormenting of malefactors, Supplicia Male- 
factorum, is no more in his eyes than the making 
of honey, or Mellifidum. Shipwreck, being Nau- 
fragium, he holds in no graver light than a feast, 
which is Convivium; and the feast is no merrier 
than the shipwreck. He has wood-cuts, with 
numerals against the figures ; to which the 
letter-press refers. In one of these, his " De- 
formed and Monstrous People," cut as jaunty 
a figure as his Adam and Eve, and seem to 
pique themselves on their titles of Beformes et 
Monstrosi. In another the soul of man is de- 
scribed by a bodily outline, standing against a 
sheet. He is never moved but by some point 
of faith. Thus, " Godliness," he says, " treads 
reason under foot, that barking dog, No. 6." — 
Oblatrantem Canem, 6. The translation, observe, 
is worthy of the original. Again : — 



Woe to the mad 
Wizards and Witches, 
who give themselves to the 

Devil 
(being inclosed in a Circle, 7. 
calling upon him 
with Charms) 
they dally with him 
and fall from God ! 
for they shall receive their 
reward with him. 



Vae dementibus 
Magis et Lamiis, 
qui Cacodaemoni se dedunt 

(inclusi Circulo, 7« 
eum advocantea 
incantamentis) 
cum eo colludunt 
et a Deo deficiunt ! 
nam cum illo 
mercedem accipient. 



But of the fall of Adam and Eve, he contents 
himself with this pithy account : — 

These being tempted 
by the Devil under the shape 
of a serpent, 3. 
when they had eaten of the 
fruit of the forbidden Tree, 4. 
were condemned, (Five). 
to misery and death, 
with all their posterity, 
and cast out of Paradise, 6. 



Hi, seducti 
a Diabolo sub specie 
Serpentis, 3. 
cum comederunt 
de fructu vetitae Arboris, 4. 
damnati sunt 5. 
ad miseriam et mortem, 
cum omni posteritate sua, 
et ejecti e Paradiso, 6. 



Opposite to this is the account of fish :- 



Add Herrings, T. 
which are brought pickled, 
and Plaice, 8. and Cod, 9. 
which are brought dry ; 
and the sea-monsters, fyc. 



Adde Haleces, 7. 
qui salsi, 

et Passeres, 8. cum Asellis, 9. 
qui adferuntur arefacti ; 
et monstra marina, &c. 



Of a similar aspect of complacency is his ac- 
count of the Last Judgment : — 

When the Godly and Elect, 

4. 
shall enter into life eternal, 
into the place of Bliss, 
and the new Jerusalem, 5. 
But the wicked 
and the damned, 6. 
with the Devils, 7 
shall be thrust into Hell. 

(No. &» 
to be there tormented for 



Ubi pii (justi) et Electi, 4. 

introibunt in vitam eternam. 

in locum Beatitudinis. 

et novam Hierosolymam, 5. 

Impii vero 

et damnati, 6. 

cum Cacodaemonibus, 7. 

in Gehennam,8. detrudentur , 
ibi cruciandi aeternum. 



OF DREAMS. 



33 



The Shipwreck ends genteelly : — 



Quidam evadunt, 
vel tabula, 7« 
ac enatando, 
vel Scapha ; 8. 
Pars Mercium 
cum mortuis 
a Mari, 9. in littora def ertur. 



Some escape, 
either on a plank, 7- 
and by swimming, 
or in a Boat ; 8. 
Part of the Wares, 
with the dead folks, 
is carried out of the sea, 9. 
upon the shores. 



So in the Tormenting of Malefactors, he 
speaks of torture in a parenthesis, and talks of 
pulling traitors in pieces in the style of a nota- 
bene. " They that have their life given them" 
appear to be still worse off. 



Malefactors, 1. 

are brought 

from the Prison, 3. 

(where they are wont to be 

tortured) by Serjeants, 2, 

Some before they are exe- 
cuted have their Tongues cut 

out, 11. 

or have their Hand, 12. 

cut off upon a Block, 13. 

or are burnt with Pincers, 14. 

They that have their Life 

given them, 

are set on the pillory, 16. 

are strapado'd, 17. 

are set upon a Wooden Horse, 
18. 

have their ears cut off, 19. 

are whipped with Rods, 20. 

are branded, 

are banished, 

are condemned 

to the Galleys, 

or to perpetual Imprison- 
ment. 

Traitors are pulled in 
pieces with four Horses. 



Malefici, 1. 

producuntur 

e Carcere, 3. 

(ubi torqueri solent) 

per Lictores, 2. 

Quidam antequam supplicio 

afEciantur eliguantur, 1 1 . 

aut plectuntur Manu, 12. 
super cippum, 13. 
aut Forcipibus, 14. uruntur. 
Vita donati 

constringunturNumellis, 16 
luxantur, 17. 
imponuntur Equuleo, 18. 

truncantur Auribus, 19. 

caeduntur Virgis, 20. 

stigmate notantur, 

relegantur, 

damnantur 

ad Triremes, 

vel ad Carcerem perpetuam. 



Perduelles discerpuntur 
quadrigis. 



LVL— OF DREAMS. 

The materialists and psychologists are at 
issue upon the subject of dreams. The latter 
hold them to be one among the many proofs of 
the existence of a soul : the former endeavour 
to account for them upon principles altogether 
corporeal. "We must own, that the effects of 
their respective arguments, as is usual with us 
on these occasions, is not so much to satisfy 
us with either, as to dissatisfy us with both. 
The psychologist, with all his struggles, never 
appears to be able to get rid of his body ; and 
the materialist leaves something extremely 
deficient in the vivacity of his proofs, by his 
ignorance of that primum inobile, which is the 
soul of everything. In the mean time, while 
they go on with their laudable inquiries (for 
which we have a very sincere respect), it is 
our business to go on recommending a taste 
for results as well as causes, and turning every- 
thing to account in this beautiful star of ours, 
the earth. There is no reason why the acutest 
investigator of mysteries should not enjoy his 

[PART II.] 



existence, and have his earthly dreams made 
as pleasant as possible ; and for our parts, we 
see nothing at present, either in body or soul, 
but a medium for a world of perceptions, the 
very unpleasantest of whose dreams are but 
warnings to us how we depart from the health 
and natural piety of the pleasant ones. 

What seems incontrovertible in the case of 
dreams is, that they are most apt to take place 
when the body is most affected. They seem 
to turn most upon us when the suspension of 
the will has been reduced to its most helpless 
state by indulgence. The door of the fancy is 
left without its keeper, and forth issue, pell- 
mell, the whole rout of ideas or images, which 
had been stored within the brain, and kept to 
their respective duties. They are like a 
school let loose, or the winds in Virgil, or 
Lord Anson's drunken sailors at Panama, who 
dressed themselves up in all sorts of ridiculous 
apparel. 

"We were about to say, that being writers, 
we are of necessity dreamers ; for thinking 
disposes the bodily faculties to be more than 
usually affected by the causes that generally 
produce dreaming. But extremes appear to 
meet on this, as on other occasions, at least as 
far as the meditative power is concerned ; for 
there is an excellent reasoner now living, who 
telling another that he was not fond of the 
wilder parts of the Arabian Nights, was answered 
with great felicity, " Then you never dream." 
It turned out that he really dreamt little. 
Here the link is impaired that connects a ten- 
dency to indigestion with thinking on the one 
hand, and dreaming on the other. If we are 
to believe Herodotus, the Atlantes, an African 
people, never dreamt ; which Montaigne is 
willing to attribute to their never having eaten 
anything that died of itself. It is to be pre- 
sumed that he looked upon their temperance 
as a matter of course. The same philosopher, 
who was a deep thinker and of a delicate con- 
stitution, informs us that he himself dreamt 
but sparingly ; but then when he did, his 
dreams were fantastic though cheerful. This is 
the very triumph of the animal spirits, to unite 
the strangeness of sick dreams with the cheer- 
fulness of healthy ones. To these exceptions 
against the usual theories we may add, that 
dreams are by no means modified of necessity 
by what the mind has been occupied with in 
the course of the day, or even of months ; for 
during our two years' confinement in prison, 
we did not dream more than twice of our chief 
subjects of reflection, the prison itself not ex- 
cepted.* The two dreams were both connected 
with the latter, and both the same. We fancied 
that we had slipped out of jail, and gone to 
the theatre, where we were horrified by seeing 
the faces of the whole audience unexpectedly 
turned upon us. 

* See a remarkable coincidence in the Essay on Dreams, 
in Mr. Hazlitt's Plain Speaker. 



•M 



THE INDICATOR. 



It is certain enough, however, that dreams 
in general proceed from indigestion ; and it 
appears nearly as much so, that they are more 
or less strange according to the waking fancy 
of the dreamer. 

All dreams, as in old Galen I have read, 

Are from repletion and complexion bred, 

From rising fumes of indigested food, 

And noxious humours that infect the blood. 

— When choler overflows, then dreams are bred 

Of flames, and all the family of red. 

— Choler adust congeals the blood with fear, 

Then black bulls toss us, and black devils tear. 

In sanguine airy dreams aloft we bound, 

With rheums oppress'd, we sink, in rivers drown'd. 

Drvden's Cock and the Fox, from Chaucer, 

Again, in another passage, which is worth 
quoting instead of the original, and affords a 
good terse specimen of the author's versifi- 
cation : — 

Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes ; 
When Monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes ; 
Compounds a medley of disjointed things, 
A mob of cobblers and a court of kings : * 
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad : 
Both are the reasonable soul run mad ; 
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see, 
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be. 
Sometimes forgotten things, long cast behind, 
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind. 
The nurse's legends are for truths received, 
And the man dreams but what the boy believed ; 
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play, -\ 

The night restores our actions done by day ; I 

As hound? in sleep will open for their prey. ) 

In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece, 
Chimeras all ; and more absurd or less. 

It is probable that a trivial degree of indi- 
gestion will give rise to very fantastic dreams 
in a fanciful mind ; while, on the other hand, 
a good orthodox repletion is necessary towards 
a fanciful creation in a dull one. It shall 
make an epicure, of any vivacity, act as many 
parts in his sleep as a tragedian, "for that 
night only." The inspirations of veal, in par- 
ticular, are accounted extremely Delphic ; 
Italian pickles partake of the same spirit of 
Dante ; and a butter-boat shall contain as 
many ghosts as Charon's. 

There is a passage in Lucian, which would 
have made a good subject for those who painted 
the temptations of the saints. It is a descrip- 
tion of the City of Dreams, very lively and 
crowded. We quote after Natalis Comes, not 
having the True History by us. The city, we 
are told, stands in an immense plain, sur- 
rounded by a thick forest of tall poppy-trees, 
and enormous mandragoras. The plain is also 
full of all sorts of somniculous plants, and the 
trees are haunted with multitudes of owls and 
bats, but no other bird. The city is washed by 
the river Lethe, called by others the Night- 
bringer, whose course is inaudible, and like the 

* Perhaps a misprint for 

A court of cobblers and a mob of kings. 



flowing of oil. (Spenser's follower, Browne, has 
been here: 

Where consort none other fowl, 
Save the bat and sullen owl ; 
Where flows Lethe without coil, 
Softly, like a stream of oil. 

Inner Temple Mask.) 

There are two gates to the city : one of horn, 
in which almost everything that can happen in 
sleep is represented, as in a transparency ; the 
other of ivory, in which the dreams are but 
dimly shadowed. The principal temple is that 
of Night ; and there are others, dedicated to 
Truth and Falsehood, who have oracles. The 
population consists of Dreams, who are of an 
infinite variety of shape. Some are small and 
slender ; others distorted, humped, and mon- 
strous ; others proper and tall, with blooming 
good-tempered faces. Others, again, have 
terrible countenances, are winged, and seem 
eternally threatening the city with some cala- 
mity ; while others walk about in the pomp 
and garniture of kings. If any mortal comes 
into the place, there is a multitude of domestic 
Dreams, who meet him with offers of service ; 
and they are followed by some of the others 
that bring him good or bad news, generally 
false ; for the inhabitants of that city are, for 
the most part, a lying and crafty generation, 
speaking one thing and thinking another. 
This is having a new advantage over us. 
Only think of the mental reservation of a 
Dream ! 

If Lucian had divided his city into ranks 
and denominations, he might possibly have 
classed them under the heads of Dreams Lofty, 
Dreams Liidicrous, Dreams Pathetic, Dreams 
Horrible, Dreams Bodily Painful or Pleasant, 
Dreams of Common Life, Dreams of New 
Aspects of Humanity ; Dreams Mixed, Fan- 
tastic, and utterly Confused. He speaks of 
winged ones, which is judicious, for they are 
very common ; but unless Natalis Comes, who 
is not a very bright person, misrepresents him, 
he makes them of the melancholy class, which, 
in general, they are not. 

In airy sanguine dreams a?oft we bound. 

Nothing is more common, or usually more 
pleasant, than to dream of flying. It is one 
of the best specimens of the race ; for besides 
being agreeable, it is made up of the dreams 
of ordinary life and those of surprising combi- 
nation. Thus the dreamer sometimes thinks 
he is flying in unknown regions, sometimes 
skimming only a few inches above the ground, 
and wondering he never did it before. He 
will even dream that he is dreaming about it ; 
and yet is so fully convinced of its feasibility, 
and so astonished at his never having hit upon 
so delightful a truism, that he is resolved to 
practise it the moment he wakes. " One has 
only," says he, " to give a little spring with 
one's foot, so, and— oh ! it's the easiest and 



OF DREAMS. 



m 



most obvious thing in the world. I'll always 
skim hereafter." We dreamt once that a 
woman set up some Flying Rooms, as a person 
does a tavern. We went to try them, and 
nothing could be more satisfactory and com- 
mon-place on all sides. The landlady wel- 
comed us with a curtsey, hoped for friends and 
favours, &c, and then snowed us into a spacious 
room, not round, as might be expected, but 
long, and after the usual dining fashion. 
" Perhaps, Sir," said she, " you would like to 
try the room." Upon which we made no more 
ado, but sprung up and made two or three 
genteel circuits ; now taking the height of it, 
like a house-lark, and then cutting the angles, 
like a swallow. " Very pretty flying indeed," 
said we, u and very moderate." 

A house for the purpose of taking flights in, 
when the open air was to be had for nothing, 
is fantastic enough ; but what shall we say to 
those confoundings of all time, place, and sub- 
stance, which are constantly happening to per- 
sons of any creativeness of stomach ? Thus, 
you shall meet a friend in a gateway, who be- 
sides being your friend shall be your enemy ; 
and besides being Jones or Tomkins, shall be 
a bull ; and besides asking you in, shall oppose 
your entrance. Nevertheless you are not at 
all surprised ; or if surprised, you are only so 
at something not surprising. To be Tomkins 
and a bull at once, is the most ordinary of com- 
mon-places ; but that, being a bull, he should 
have horns, is what astonishes you ; and you 
are amazed at his not being in Holborn or the 
Strand, where he never lived. To be in two 
places at once is not uncommon to a dreamer. 
He will also be young and old at the same time, 
a schoolboy and a man ; will live many years 
in a few minutes, like the Sultan who dipped 
his head in the tub of water ; will be full of 
zeal and dialogue upon some matter of indif- 
ference ; go to the opera with a dish under his 
arm, to be in the fashion ; talk faster in verse 
than prose ; and ask a set of horses to a musi- 
cal party, telling them that he knows they will 
be pleased, because blue is the general wear, 
and Mozart has gone down to Gloucestershire, 
to fit up a house for Epaminondas. 

It is a curious proof of the concern which 
body has in these vagaries, that when you dream 
of any particular limb being in pain, you shall 
most likely have gone to sleep in a posture that 
affects it. A weight on the feet will produce 
dreams in which you are rooted to the ground, 
or caught by a goblin out of the earth. A 
cramped hand or leg shall get you tortured in 
the Inquisition ; and a head too much thrown 
back, give you the sense of an interminable visi- 
tation of stifling. The nightmare, the heaviest 
punisher of repletion, will visit some persons 
merely for lying on their backs ; which showshow 
much it is concerned in a particular condition of 
the frame. Sometimes it lies upon the chest like 
a vital lump. Sometimes it comes in the guise 



of a horrid dwarf, or malignant little hag, who 
grins in your teeth and will not let you rise. 
Its most common enormity is to pin you to the 
ground with excess of fear, while something 
dreadful is coming up, a goblin or a mad bull. 
Sometimes the horror is of a very elaborate 
description, such as being spell-bound in an old 
house, which has a mysterious and shocking 
possessor. He is a gigantic deformity, and 
will pass presently through the room in which 
you are sitting. He comes, not a giant, but a 
dwarf, of the most strange and odious descrip- 
tion, hairy, spider-like, and chuckling. His 
mere passage is unbearable. The agony arises 
at every step. You would protest against so 
malignant a sublimation of the shocking, but 
are unable to move or speak. At length you give 
loiid and long-drawn groans, and start up with 
a praeternatural effort, awake. 

Mr. Coleridge, whose sleeping imagination is 
proportioned to his waking, has described a 
fearful dream of mental and bodily torture. 
As the beautiful poems of Ckristabel, &c. which 
accompany it, seem to have been too imagina- 
tive to be understood by the critics, and conse- 
quently have wanted the general attention 
which the town are pleased to give or otherwise 
according to the injunctions of those gentlemen, 
we shall indulge ourselves in extracting the 
whole of it. It is entitled the Pains of Sleep. 

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, 

It hath not been my use to pray 

With moving lips on bended knees ; 

But silently, by slow degrees, 

My spirit I to love compose, 

In humble trust mine eye-lids close, 

With reverential resignation, 

No wish conceived, no thought express' d • 

Only a sense of supplication, 

A sense o'er all my soul imprest, 

That I am weak, yet not unblest, 

Since in me, round me, everywhere 

Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. 

But yester-night I pray'd aloud 

In anguish and in agony, 

Up-starting from the fiendish crowd 

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me ; 

A lurid light, a trampling throng, 

Sense of intolerable wrong, 

And whom I scom'd, those only strong ! 

Thirst of revenge, the powerless will, 

Still baffled, and yet burning still ■ 

Desire with loathing strangely mix'd 

On wild or hateful objects fix'd. 

Fantastic passions ! madd'ning brawl ! 

And shame and terror over all ! 

Deeds to be hid which were not hid, 

Which all confused I could Dot know, 

Whether I suffer'd, or I did : 

For all seem'd guilt, remorse or woe, 

My own or others still the same, 

Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame ! 

So two nights pass'd : the night's dismay 
Sadden'd and stunn'd the coming day. 
Sleep, the wide blessing, seem'd to me 
Distemper's worst calamity. 
The third night, when my own loud scream 
Had waked me from the fiendish dream, 

D 3 



36 



THE INDICATOR. 



O'crcome with sufferings strange and wild, 

I wept as I had been a child ; 

And having thus by tears subdued 

My anguish to a milder mood, 

Such punishments, I said, were due 

To natures deepliest stain'd with sin : 

For aye entempesting anew 

Th' unfathomable hell within 

The horror of their deeds to view, 

To know and loathe, yet wish to do ! 

Such griefs with such men well agree, 

But wherefore, wherefore fall on me ? 

To be beloved is all I need, 

And whom I love, I love indeed. 

This is the dream of a poet, and does not end 
with the question of a philosopher. We do 
not pretend to determine why we should have 
any pains at all. It is enough for us, in our 
attempt to diminish them, that there are more 
pleasant than painful excitements in the world, 
and that many pains are the causes of pleasure. 
But what if these pains are for the same end ? 
What if all this heaping and war of agonies 
were owing to the author's having taken too 
little exercise, or eaten a heavier supper than 
ordinary ? But then the proportion ! What 
proportion, it may be asked, is there between 
the sin of neglected exercise and such infernal 
visitations as these ? We answer, — the propor- 
tion, not of the particular offence, but of the 
general consequences. We have before observ- 
ed, but it cannot be repeated too often, that 
Nature, charitable as any poet or philosopher 
can be upon the subject of merit and demerit, 
&c. seems to insist, beyond anything else, upon 
our taking care of the mould in which she has 
cast us ; or in other words, of that ground- work 
of all comfort, that box which contains the 
jewel of existence, our health. On turning to 
the preceding poem in the book, entitled Kubla 
Khan, we perceive that in his introduction to 
that pleasanter vision, the author speaks of the 
present one as the dream of pain and disease. 
Kubla Khan, which was meditated under the 
effects of opium, he calls " a psychological curi- 
osity." It is so ; but it is also, and still more, 
a somatological or bodily one ; for body will 
effect these things upon the mind, when the 
mind can do no such thing upon itself; and 
therefore the shortest, most useful, and most 
philosophical way of proceeding, is to treat the 
phenomenon in the manner most serviceable to 
the health and comfort of both. We subjoin 
the conclusion of Kubla Klian, as beginning 
with an exquisite piece of music, and ending 
with a most poetical phantasm : — 

A damsel with a dulcimer 

In a vision once I saw ; 
It was an Abyssinian maid, 
And on her dulcimer she play'd, 

Singing of Mount Abora. 

Could I revive within me 
Her symphony and song, 
To such a deep delight 'twould win ma, 
That with music loud and long 



I would build that dome in air, 
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice ! 
And all who heard should see them there, • 
And all should cry Beware, Beware, 
His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! 
Weave a circle round him thrice, 
And close your eyes with holy dread ; 
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drank of the milk of Paradise. 

If horrible and fantastic dreams are the most 
perplexing, there are pathetic ones more sad- 
dening. A friend dreaming of the loss of his 
friend, or a lover of that of his mistress, or a 
kinsman of that of a dear relation, is steeped in 
the bitterness of death. To wake and find it 
not true, — what a delicious sensation is that ! 
On the other hand, to dream of a friend or a 
beloved relative restored to us, — to live over 
again the hours of childhood at the knee of a 
beloved mother, to be on the eve of marrying 
*an affectionate mistress, with a thousand other 
joys snatched back out of the grave, and too 
painful to dwell upon, — what a dreary rush of 
sensation comes like a shadow upon us when 
we wake ! How true, and divested of all that 
is justly called conceit in poetry, is that termi- 
nation of Milton's sonnet on dreaming of his 
deceased wife, — 

But oh, as to embrace me she inclined, 

I waked ; she fled ; and day brought back my night. 

It is strange that so good and cordial a critic 
as Warton should think this a mere conceit on 
his blindness. An allusion to his blindness 
may or may not be involved in it ; but the 
sense of returning shadow on the mind is true 
to nature, and must have been experienced by 
every one who has lost a person dear to him. 
There is a beautiful sonnet by Camoens on a 
similar occasion ; a small canzone by Sanaz- 
zaro, which ends with saying, that although he 
waked and missed his lady's hand in his, he 
still tried to cheat himself by keeping his eyes 
shut ; and three divine dreams of Laura by 
Petrarch, Sonnet xxxiv. Vol. 2. Sonnet lxxix. 
ib. and the canzone beginning 

Quando il soave mio fido conforto. 

But we must be cautious how we think of 
the poets on this most poetical subject, or we 
shall write three articles instead of one. As 
it is, we have not left ourselves room for some 
very agreeable dreams, which we meant to have 
taken between these our gallant and imagina- 
tive sheets. They must be interrupted, as they 
are apt to be, like the young lady's in the Ad- 
ventures of a Lapdog, who blushing divinely, 
had just uttered the words, " My Lord, I am 
wholly yours," when she was awaked by the 
jumping up of that officious little puppy. 



A HUMAN ANIMAL, AND THE OTHER EXTREME. 



37 



LVIL— A HUMAN ANIMAL, AND THE 
OTHER EXTREME. 

"We met the other day with the following 
description of an animal of quality in a Bio- 
graphical Dictionary that was published in the 
year 1767, and which is one of the most 
amusing and spirited publications of the kind 
that we remember to have seen. The writer 
does not give his authority for this particular 
memoir, so that it was probably furnished from 
his own knowledge ; but that the account is a 
true one, is evident. Indeed, with the excep- 
tion of one or two eccentricities of prudence 
which rather lean to the side of an excess of 
instinct, it is but an individual description, re- 
ferring to a mimerous class of the same nature, 
that once flourished with horn and hound in 
this country, and specimens of which are to be 
found here and there still.* The title we have 
put at the head of it is not quite correct and 
exclusive enough as a definition ; since, pro- 
perly speaking, we lords of the creation are all 
human animals ; but the mere animal, or bodily 
and breathing faculty, is combined in us more 
or less with intellect and sentiment ; and of 
these refinements of the perception, few bipeds 
that have arrived at the dignity of a coat and 
boots, have partaken so little as the noble squire 
before us. How far some of us, who take our- 
selves for very rational persons, do or do not go 
beyond him, we shall perhaps see in the course 
of our remarks. 

" The Honourable William Hastings, a 
gentleman of a very singular character," says 
our informant, " lived in the year 1638, and by 
his quality was son, brother, and uncle to the 
Earls of Huntingdon. He was peradventure 
an original in our age, or rather the copy of our 
ancient nobility, in hunting, not in warlike 
times. 

a He was very low, very strong, and very 
active, of a reddish flaxen hair ; his clothes 
green cloth, and never all worth, when new, 
five pounds. 

u His house was perfectly of the old fashion, 
in the midst of a large park well stocked with 
deer, and near the house rabbits to serve his 
kitchen ; many fish-ponds ; great store of 
wood and timber ; a bowling-green in it, long 
but narrow, and full of high ridges, it being 
never levelled since it was plowed: they 
used round sand bowls ; and it had a banqueting 
house like a stand, a large one, built in a tree. 

" He kept all manner of sport hounds, that 
run buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger ; and 
hawks, long and short-wing'd. He had all sorts 
of nets for fish ; he had a walk in the New 
Forest ; and in the manor of Christ Church : 
this last supplied him with red deer, sea and 

* Since writing this, we have discovered that the original 
is in HutchiDs'3 History of Dorsetshire. See Gilpin's 
Forest Scenery, or Drake's Shakspeare and his Times. It 
is said to have been written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury. 



river fish. And indeed all his neighbours' 
grounds and royalties were free to him ; who 
bestowed all his time on these sports, but what 
he borrowed to caress his neighbours' wives 
and daughters ; there being not a woman, in all 
his walks, of the degree of a yeoman's wife, 
and under the age of forty, but it was extremely 
her fault, if he was not intimately acquainted 
with her. This made him very popular ; always 
speaking kindly to the husband, brother, or 
father, who was to boot very welcome to his 
house whenever he came. 

" There he found beef, pudding, and small 
beer in great plenty ; a house not so neatly 
kept as to shame him or his dusty shoes ; 
the great hall strewed with marrow-bones, 
full of hawks, perches, hounds, spaniels, and 
terriers ; the upper side of the hall hung with 
the fox skins of this and the last year's killing ; 
here and there a pole-cat intermixed ; game- 
keepers' and hunters' poles in great abundance. 

" The parlour was a great room as properly 
furnished. On a great hearth, paved with 
brick,lay some terriers, and the choicest hounds 
and spaniels. Seldom but two of the great 
chairs had litters of young cats in them, which 
were not to be disturbed ; he having always 
three or four attending him at dinner, and a 
little white round stick of fourteen inches long 
lying by his trencher, that he might defend such 
meat as he had no mind to part with to them. 

" The windows, which were very large, served 
for places to lay his arrows, cross-bows, stone- 
bows, and other such like acoutrements. The 
corners of the room, full of the best chose 
hunting and hawking poles. An oyster table 
at the lower end ; which was of constant use, 
twice a day, all the year round. For he never 
failed to eat oysters, before dinner and supper, 
through all seasons : the neighbouring town of 
Pool supplied him with them. 

" The upper part of the room had two small 
tables and a desk, on the one side of which 
was a Church Bible, and, on the other, the Book 
of Martyrs. On the tables were hawks'-hoods, 
bells, and such like ; two or three old green 
hats, with their crowns thrust in, so as to hold 
ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a pheasant 
kind of poultry, which he took much care of, 
and fed himself. In the whole of the desk 
were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used. 

" On one side of this end of the room was the 
door of a closet, wherein stood the strong beer 
and the wine, which never came thence but in 
single glasses, that being the rule of the house 
exactly observed. For he never exceeded in 
drink, or permitted it. 

" On the other side was the door into an old 
chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, 
as the safest place, was never wanting of a 
cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of 
bacon, or great apple-pye, with thick crust 
extremely baked . His table cost him not much, 
though it was good to eat at. 



33 



THE INDICATOR. 



"His sports supplied all but beef and mutton; 
except Fridays, when he had the best of salt 
fish (as well as other fish) he could get ; and 
was the day his neighbours of best quality most 
visited him. He never wanted a London pud- 
ding, and always sung it in with 'My peart 
lies therein-a.' He drank a glass or two of 
wine at meals ; very often syrup of gilliflowers 
in his sack ; and had always a tun glass with- 
out feet, stood by him, holding a pint of small 
beer, which he often stirred with rosemary. 

"He was well-natured, but soon angry; calling 
his servants bastards and cuckoldy knaves ; 
in one of which he often spoke truth to his own 
knowledge, and sometimes in both, though of 
the same man. He lived to be an hundred ; 
never lost his eye-sight, but always wrote and 
read without spectacles ; and got on horse- 
back without help. Until past four-score, he 
rode to the death of a stag as well as any." 

It is clear, that this worthy personage was 
nothing more than a kind of beaver or badger 
in human shape. We imagine him haunting 
the neighbourhood in which he lived, like a pet 
creature, who had acquired a certain iEgyptian 
godship among the natives ; now hunting for 
his fish, now for his flesh, now fawning after 
his uncouth fashion upon a pretty girl, and now 
snarling and contesting a bone with his dogs. 
We imagine him the animal principle personi- 
fied ; a symbol on horseback ; a jolly dog sitting 
upright at dinner, like a hieroglyphic on a 
pedestal. 

Buffou has a subtle answer to those who argue 
for the rationality of bees. He says that the 
extreme order of their proceedings, and the 
undeviating apparent forethought with which 
they anticipate and provide for a certain geome- 
trical necessity in a part of the structure of their 
hives, are only additional proofs of the force of 
instinct. They have an instinct for the order, 
and an instinct for the anticipation ; and they 
prove that it is not reason, by never striking 
out anything new. The same thing is observ- 
able in our human animal. What would be 
reason or choice in another man, is to be set 
down in him to poverty of ideas. If Tasso had 
been asked the reason of his always wearing 
black, he would probably have surprised the 
inquirer by a series of observations on colour, 
and dignity, and melancholy, and the darkness 
of his fate ; but if Petrarch or Boccaccio had 
discussed the matter with him, he might have 
changed it to purple. A lady, in the same 
manner, wears black, because it suits her com- 
plexion, or is elegant at all times, or because 
it is at once piquant and superior. But in 
spring, she may choose to put on the colours of 
the season, and in summer to be gaudier with 
the butterfly. Our squire had an instinct to- 
wards the colour of green, because he saw it 
about him. He took it from what he lived in, 
like a cameleon, and never changed it, because 
he could live in no other sphere. We see that 



his green suit was never worth five pounds ; 
and nothing, we dare say, could have induced 
him to let it mount up to that sum. He would 
have had it grow on him, if he could, like a green 
monkey. Thus again with his bowling-green. 
It was not penuriousness that hindered him 
from altering it, but he had no more idea of 
changing the place than the place itself. As 
change of habit is frightful to some men, from 
vivacity of affection or imagination, and the 
strangeness which they anticipate in the novelty, 
so Mr. Hastings was never tempted out of a 
custom, because he had no idea of anything 
else. He would no more think of altering the 
place he burrowed in, than a tortoise or a wild 
rabbit. He was ferae naturae, — a regular beast 
of prey ; though he mingled something of the 
generosity of the lion with the lurking of the 
fox and the mischievous sporting of the cat. 
He would let other animals feed with him, 
only warning them off occasionally with that 
switch of his, instead of a claw. He had the 
same liberality of instinct towards the young 
of other creatures, as we see in the hen and 
the goat. He would take care of their eggs, \ 
if he had a mind ; or furnish them with milk. ' 
His very body was badger-like. It was, " very 
low, very strong, and very active ; " and he | 
had a coarse fell of hair. A good housewife I 
might have called his house a kennel, without j 
being abusive. What the ladies of the Hunt- I 
ingdon family thought of it, if ever they came : 
to see him, we do not know ; but next to \ 
hearing such a fellow as Squire Western talk, : 
must have been the horror of his human kin- 
dred in treading those menageries, his hall and 
parlour. They might turn the lines of Chaucer 
into an exclamation : — 

, What hawkis sitten on the perch above ! 
What houndis liggen on the floor adown ! 

Then the marrow-bones, the noise, and, to a I 
delicate ancle, the sense of danger ! Conceive \ 
a timid stranger, not very welcome, obliged to j 
pass through the great hall. The whole animal ' 
world is up. The well-mouthed hounds begin i 
barking, the mastiff bays, the terriers snap, the 
hawks sidle and stare, the poultry gobble, the 
cats growl and up with their backs. At last, 
the Hastings makes his appearance, and laughs 
like a goblin. 

Three things are specially observable in our 
hero : first, that his religion as well as literature \ 
was so entirely confined to faith, that it allowed [ 
him to turn his household chapel into a larder, 
and do anything else he pleased, short of not 
ranking the Bible and Book of Martyrs with his 
other fixtures : — second, that he carried his I 
prudential instincts to a pitch unusual in a 
country squire, who can rarely refrain from \ 
making extremes meet with humanity in this I 
instance : — and third, that his proneness to the 
animal part of love, never finding him in a con- 
dition to be so brutal, as drinking renders a | 



A HUMAN ANIMAL, AND THE OTHER EXTREME. 



39 



gallant of this sort, left himself as well as 
others in sufficient good humour, not only to 
get him forgiven hy the females, but to act 
kindly and be tolerated by the men. He was 
as temperate in his liquor as one of his cats, 
drinking only to quench thirst, and leaving off 
when he had enough. This perhaps was partly 
owing to his rank, which did not render it 
necessary to his importance to be emulous with 
his bottle among the squires. As to some 
grave questions connected with the promiscuous 
nature of his amours, an animal so totally given 
up to his instincts as he was, can hardly be 
held responsible upon such points ; though 
they are worth the consideration of those who 
in their old age undertake to be moral as 
well as profligate. If Mr. Hastings's notion 
was good and even useful, so far as it showed 
the natural good-humour of that passion in 
human beings, where sickness or jealousy is out 
of the question, in every other respect it was - as 
poor and paltry as could be. There was not a 
single idea in it beyond one of his hounds. It 
was entirely gross and superficial, without sen- 
timent, without choice, without a thousand 
sensations of pleasure and the return of it, 
without the least perception of a beauty beyond 
the mere absence of age. The most idiotical 
scold in the village, " under forty," was to him 
a desirable object. The most loveable woman 
in the world above it, was lost upon him. Such 
lovers do not even enjoy the charms they sup- 
pose. They do not see a twentieth part of the 
external graces. They criticise beauty in the 
language of a horse-jockey ; and the jockey, or 
the horse himself, knows just as much about it 
as they. 

In short, to be candid on all sides with the 
very earthy memory of the Honourable Mr. 
William Hastings, we take a person of his 
description to be a good specimen of the animal 
part of the human nature, and chiefly on this 
account, that the animal preserves its health. 
There indeed it has something to say for itself ; 
nor must we conceal our belief, that upon this 
ground alone, the Hastings must have had sen- 
sations in the course of his life, which many an 
intellectual person might envy. His percep- 
tions must have been of a vague sort, but 
they were in all probability exquisitely clear 
and unalloyed. He must have had all the 
pleasure from the sunshine and the fresh air, 
that a healthy body without a mind in it can 
have ; and we may guess from the days of 
childhood, what those feelings mayresemble, in 
their pleasantness, as well as vagueness. At 
the age of a hundred he was able to read and 
write without spectacles ; not better perhaps 
than he did at fifteen, but as well. At a hun- 
dred, he was truly an old boy, and no more 
thought of putting on spectacles than an eagle. 
Why should he ? His blood had run clear for 
a century with exercise and natural living. He 
had not baked it black and "heavy thick" 



over a fire, nor dimmed the windows of his 
perception with the smoke. 

But he wanted a soul to turn his perceptions 
to their proper account ? — He did so. Let us 
then, who see more than he did, contrive to 
see fair play between body and mind. It is by 
observing the separate extremes of perfection, 
to which body and mind may arrive, in those 
who do not now know to unite both, that we 
may learn how to produce a human being more 
enviable than either the healthiest of fox- 
hunters or the most unearthly of saints. It is 
remarkable, that the same ancient family, 
which, among the variety and fineness of its 
productions, put forth this specimen of bodily 
humanity, edified the world not long after 
with as complete a specimen of the other half 
of human nature. Mr. William Hastings' 
soul seems to have come too late for his body, 
and to have remained afterwards upon earth in 
the shape of his fair kinswoman, the Lady 
Elizabeth Hastings, daughter of Theophilus, 
seventh Earl of Huntingdon. An account of 
her follows that of her animal kinsman, and is 
a most extraordinary contrast. This is the 
lady who is celebrated by Sir Richard Steele 
in the Tatter under the name of Aspasia, — a 
title which must have startled her a little. 
But with the elegance of the panegyric she 
would have found it hard not to be pleased, 
notwithstanding her modesty. u These ancients 
would be as much astonished to see in the 
same age so illustrious a pattern to all who 
love things praiseworthy, as the divine Aspasia. 
Methinks I now see her walking in her garden 
like our first parent, with unaffected charms, 
before beauty had spectators, and bearing 
celestial, conscious virtue in her aspect. Her 
countenance is the lively picture of her mind, 
which is the seat of honour, truth, compassion, 
knowledge, and innocence : — 

' There dwells the scorn of vice and pity too.' 

" In the midst of the most ample fortune, 
and veneration of all that beheld and knew 
her, without the least affectation, she consults 
retirement, the contemplation of her own being, 
and that supreme power which bestowed it. 
Without the learning of schools, or knowledge 
of a long course of arguments, she goes on in a 
steady course of virtue, and adds to the seve- 
rity of the last age all the freedom and ease of 
the present. The language and mien of a 
court she is possessed of in the highest degree ; 
but the simplicity and humble thoughts of a 
cottage are her more welcome entertainment. 
Aspasia is a female philosopher, who does not 
only live up to the resignation of the most 
retired lives of the ancient sages, but also the 
schemes and plans which they thought beauti- 
ful, though inimitable. This lady is the most 
exact economist, without appearing busy ; the 
most strictly virtuous, without tasting the 
praise of it ; and shuns applause with as much 



40 



THE INDICATOR. 



industry as others do reproach. This character 
is so particular, that it will be very easily fixed 
on her only, by all that know her, but I dare 
say she will be the last to find it out." — Tatler, 
No. xlii. July 16, 1709. 

This character was written when Lady Eliza- 
beth was twenty-eight*. She passed the rest 
of her life agreeably to it, relieving families, 
giving annuities, contributing to the mainte- 
nance of schools and university-scholars, and 
all the while behaving with extraordinary 
generosity to her kindred, and keeping up a 
noble establishment. Those whom such a de- 
scription incites to know more of her, will find 
a good summary of her way of life in Miss 
Hays's Female Biography, — a work, by the way, 
which contrives to be at once conventional and 
liberal, and ought to be in possession of all her 
countrywomen. 

Miss Hays informs us, that the close of this 
excellent person's life was as suffering as it 
was patient. An accidental contusion in her 
bosom, at an early period of life, had left 
the seeds of a cancer, which for many years 
she disregarded. About a year and a half 
before her death she was obliged to undergo 
an amputation of the part affected, which she 
did with a noble and sweet fortitude, described 
in a very touching manner by another of her 
biographers. " Her ladyship," he tells us, 
"underwent this painful operation with sur- 
prising patience and resolution ; she shewed 
no reluctancy, no struggle or contention ; only, 
indeed, towards the end of the operation she 
drew such a sigh as any compassionate reader may 
when he hears this.'' This is one of the truest 
and most pathetic things we remember to have 
read. Unfortunately, the amputation, though 
it promised well for a time, did no good at last. 
The disorder returned with greater malignity, 
and after submitting to it with her usual 
patience, and exhorting her household and 
friends, upon her death-bed, in a high strain of 
enthusiasm, she expired on the 22d December, 
1739, in the fifty-seventh year of her age. 
" Her character in miniature," says the biogra- 
pher just quoted, "is this. She was a lady of 
the exactest breeding, of fine intellectual en- 
dowments, filled with divine wisdom, renewed 
in the spirit of her mind, fired with the love of 
her Creator, a friend to all the world, mortified 
in soul and body, and to everything that is 
earthly, and a little lower than the angels." 
He has a mysterious anecdote of her in the 
course of his account. " The following remark- 
able circumstance happened to her in her 
youth. A young lady, of less severity of man- 
ners than herself, invited her once to an enter- 
tainment over a romance, and very dear did 
she pay for it ; what evil tinctures she took 

* It is attributed by the annotators to Congreve,— I 
know not on what authority. If I know anything of style, 
I can swear it was Steele's. The moral elegance and faith 
of it, and the turn of the words, are all his. 



from it I cannot tell, but this I can, that the 
remembrance of it would now and then annoy 
her spirit down into declining life." Miss Hays 
concludes the memoir in the Female Biography 
with informing us, that " she was fond of her 
pen, and frequently employed herself in writ- 
ing ; but, previous to her death, destroyed the 
greater part of her papers. Her fortune, 
beauty, and amiable qualities, procured her 
many solicitations to change her state ; but 
she preferred, in a single and independent life, 
to be mistress of her actions and the disposi- 
tion of her income." 

It seems pretty clear from all these accounts, 
that this noble-hearted woman, notwithstanding 
her beauty and sweet temper, was as imperfect 
a specimen of animal humanity as her kinsman 
was of spiritual. We are far from meaning to 
prefer his state of existence. We confess that 
there are many persons we have read of, whom 
we would rather have been, than the most 
saintly of solitary spirits ; but the mere reflec- 
tion of the good which Lady Elizabeth did to 
others, would not allow us a moment's hesi- 
tation, if compelled to choose between in- 
habiting her infirm tenement and the jolly 
vacuity of Honourable William. At the same 
time, it is evident that the fair saint neglected 
the earthly part of herself in a way neither as 
happy-making nor as pious as she took it for. 
Perhaps the example of her kinsman tended 
to assist this false idea of what is pleasing to 
heaven, and made her a little too peremptory 
against herself ; but what had not her lovers a 
right to say? For our parts, had we lived 
then, and been at all fitted to aspire to a 
return of her regard, we should have thought 
it a very unfair and intolerable thing of her 
to go on doing the most exquisite and seducing 
actions in the world, and tell us that she 
wished to be mistress of her own time and 
generosities. So she might, and yet have been 
generous to us as well as to the charity boys. 
But setting this aside (and the real secret is to 
be found, perhaps, in matters into which we 
cannot inquire), a proper attention to that 
beauteous form which her spirit inhabited 
might have done great good to herself. She not 
only lived nearly half a century less than her 
kinsman, and thus shortened a useful life, but 
the less healthy state of her blood rendered 
even a soul like hers liable to incursions of 
melancholy to the last moment of her exist- 
ence. If it be said that this stimulated her 
the more to extract happiness out of the hap- 
piness of others, we do not deny that it may 
have done so ; nor do we pretend to say that 
this might not have been her best state of 
existence for herself and all of us, if we could 
inqiiire into matters hidden from our sight. 
But upon that principle, so might her relation's. 
It is impossible to argue to any purpose upon 
these assumptions, which are only good for 
patience, not for action. William Hastings 



RETURN OF AUTUMN. 



41 



was all bodily comfort ; Elizabeth Hastings 
was all mental grace. How far the liability of 
the former to gusts of passion, as well as the 
other conditions of his being,settled the balance 
with her necessity for being patient, it is im- 
possible to say ; but it is easy and right to say, 
that nobody would like to undergo operations 
for a cancer, or to die at fifty-seven, when they 
could live healthily to a hundred. 

What, then, is our conclusion ? This : that 
the proper point of humanity lies between the 
two natures, though not at equal distances ; the 
greatest possible sum of happiness for mankind 
demanding that great part of our pleasure 
should be founded in that of others. Those, 
however, who hold rigid theories of morality 
and yet practise them not (which ismuchoftener 
the case with such theories than the reverse), 
must take care how they flatter themselves 
they resemble Lady Elizabeth. Their extreme 
difference with her kinsman is a mere cant, to 
which all the privileged selfishness and sensu- 
ality in the world give the lie — all the pomps 
and vanities, all the hatreds, all the malignities, 
all the eatings and drinkings, such as William 
Hastings himself would have been ashamed of. 
In fact, their real instincts are generally as 
selfish as his, though in other shapes, and much 
less agreeable for everybody. When cant 
lives as long and healthy a life as his, or as good 
a one as hers, it will be worth attending to. 
Till then, the best thing to advise is, neither 
to be canting, nor merely animal, nor over- 
spiritual ; but to endeavour to enjoy, with the 
greatest possible distribution of happiness, all 
the faculties we receive from nature. 



LVIII.— RETURN OF AUTUMN. 

The autumn is now confirmed. The harvest 
is over ; the summer birds are gone or going ; 
heavy rains have swept the air of its warmth, 
and prepared the earth for the impressions of 
winter. 

And the author's season changes likewise. 
We can no longer persuade ourselves that it is 
summer, by dint of resolving to think so. We 
cannot warm ourselves at the look of the sun- 
shine. Instead of sitting at the window, 
" hindering" ourselves, as people say, with 
enjoying the sight of Nature, we find our knees 
turned round to the fire-place, our face opposite 
a pictured instead of a real landscape, and our 
feet toasting upon a fender. 

When some enjoyments go, others come. 
The boys will now be gathering their nuts. 
The trees will put forth, in their bravely dying 
leaves, all the colours of heaven and earth, 
which they have received from sun, and 
rain, and soil. Nature, in her heaps of grain 
and berries, will set before the animal creation 
as profuse and luxurious a feast, as any of our 



lordly palates have received from dish and 
dessert. 

Nature, with the help of a very little art, can 
put forth a prettier bill of fare than most per- 
sons, if people will but persuade each other 
that cheapness is as good as dearness ; — a dis- 
covery, we think, to which the tax-gatherer 
might help us. Let us see what she says this 
autumn . Imagine us seated at the bar of some 
fashionable retreat, or boxed in a sylvan scene 
of considerable resort. Enter, a waiter, the 
September of Spenser — that ingenious and (to 
a punster) oddly-dressed rogue, of whom we 
are told, that when he appeared before the 
poet, he was 

Heavy laden with the spoil 
Of harvest's riches, which he made his boot. 

At present, he assumes a more modest aspect, 
with a bunch of ash-leaves under his arm by 
way of duster. He bows like a poplar, draws 
a west wind through his teeth genteelly, and 
lays before us the following bill of entertain- 
ment : — 

Fish, infinite and cheap. 

Fruit, ditto. 

Nuts, ditto. 

Bread, ditto — taxed. 

Fresh airs, taxed if in doors — not out. 

Light, the same. 

Wine in its unadulterated shape, as grapes, 
or sunshine, or well-fermented blood. 

Arbours of ivy, wild honeysuckle, arbutus, 
&c. all in flower. 

Other flowers on table. 

The ante-room, with a view into it, immense 
with a sky-blue cupola, and hung round with 
landscapes confessedly inimitable. 

Towards the conclusion, a vocal concert 
among the trees. 

At night, falling stars, and a striking pano- 
ramic view of the heavens ; on which occasion, 
for a few nights only, the same moon will be 
introduced that was admired by the "immortal 
Shakspeare III" 

N.B. — It is reported by some malignant 
persons, that the bird-concert is not artificial : 
whereas it will be found, upon the smallest 
inspection, to beat even the most elaborate 
inventions of the justly, admired Signor Me- 
canical Fello. 



LIX.— THE MAID-SERVANT* 

Must be considered as young, or else she 
has married the butcher, the butler, or her 
cousin, or has otherwise settled into a character 
distinct from her original one, so as to become 
what is properly called the domestic. The 
Maid-Servant, in her apparel, is either slovenly 



* In some respects, particularly of costume, this portrait 
must be understood of originals existing twenty or thirty 
years ago. 



42 



THE INDICATOR. 



and fine by turns, and dirty always ; or she is 
at all times neat and tight, and dressed ac- 
cording to her station. In the latter case, her 
ordinary dress is black stockings, a stuff gown, 
a cap, and a neck-handkerchief pinned corner- 
wise behind. If you want a pin, she feels about 
her, and has always one to give you. On 
Sundays and holidays, and perhaps of after- 
noons, she changes her black stockings for 
white, puts on a gown of a better texture and 
fine pattern, sets her cap and her curls jauntily, 
and lays aside the neck-handkerchief for a 
high-body, which, by the way, is not half so 
pretty. 

The general furniture of her ordinary room, 
the kitchen, is not so much her own as her 
master's and mistress's, and need not be de- 
scribed : but in a drawer of the dresser or the 
table, in company with a duster and a pair of 
snuffers, may be found some of her property, 
such as a brass thimble, a pair of scissars, a 
thread-case, a piece of wax candle much 
wrinkled with the thread, an odd volume of 
Pamela, and perhaps a sixpenny play, such as 
George Barnwell or Southerne's Oroonoko. 
There is a piece of looking-glass in the window. 
The rest of her furniture is in the garret, where 
you may find a good looking-glass on the table ; 
and in the window a Bible, a comb and a piece 
of soap. Here stands also, under stout lock 
and key, the mighty mystery, — the box, — con- 
taining, among other things, her clothes, two 
or three song-books, consisting of nineteen for 
the penny ; sundry Tragedies at a halfpenny 
the sheet ; the Whole Nature of Dreams Laid 
Open, together with the Fortune-teller and the 
Account of the Ghost of Mrs. Veal; the Story of 
the Beautiful Zoa "who was cast away on a desart 
island, showing how," &c. ; some half-crowns in 
a purse, including pieces of country-money ; 
a silver penny wrapped up in cotton by itself ; 
a crooked sixpence, given her before she came 
to town, and the giver of which has either for- 
gotten or been forgotten by her, she is not sure 
which ; — two little enamel boxes, with looking- 
glass in the lids, one of them a fairing, the 
other a a Trifle from Margate ; " and lastly, 
various letters, square and ragged, and directed 
in all sorts of spellings, chiefly with little 
letters for capitals. One of them, written 
by a girl who went to a day-school, is directed 
"Miss." 

In her manners, the Maid-servant sometimes 
imitates, her young mistress ; she puts her hair 
in papers, cultivates a shape, and occasionally 
contrives to be out of spirits. But her own 
character and condition overcome all sophisti- 
cations of this sort ; her shape, fortified by the 
mop and scrubbing-brush, will make its way ; 
and exercise keeps her healthy and cheerful. 
From the same cause her temper is good ; 
though she gets into little heats when a stran- 
ger is over saucy, or when she is told not to go 
so heavily down stairs, or when some unthink- 



ing person goes up her wet stairs with dirty 
shoes, — or when she is called away often from 
dinner ; neither does she much like to be seen 
scrubbing the street-door steps of a morning ; 
and sometimes she catches herself saying, 
" Drat that butcher,"* but immediately adds, 
"God forgive me." The tradesmen indeed, 
with their compliments and arch looks, seldom 
give her cause to complain. The milkman 
bespeaks her good-humour for the day with 
" Come, pretty maids : " — then follow the 
butcher, the baker, the oilman, &c. all with 
their several smirks and little loiterings ; and 
when she goes to the shops herself, it is for her 
the grocer pulls down his string from its roller 
with more than ordinary whirl, and tosses his 
parcel into a tie. 

Thus pass the mornings between working, 
and singing, and giggling, and grumbling, and 
being flattered. If she takes any pleasure 
unconnected with her office before the after- 
noon, it is when she runs up the area-steps or 
to the door to hear and purchase a new song, 
or to see a troop of soldiers go by ; or when 
she happens to thrust her head out of a cham- 
ber window at the same time with a servant 
at the next house, when a dialogue infallibly 
ensues, stimulated by the imaginary obstacles 
between. If the Maid-servant is wise, the best 
part of her work is done by dinner-time ; and 
nothing else is necessary to give perfect zest 
to the meal. She tells us what she thinks of 
it, when she calls it " a bit o' dinner." There 
is the same sort of eloquence in her other 
phrase, " a cup o' tea ; " but the old ones, and 
the washerwomen, beat her at that. After tea 
in great houses, she goes with the other 
servants to hot cockles, or "What-are-my- 
thoughts-like, and tells Mr. John to "have 
done then ;" or if there is a ball given that 
night, they throw open the doors, and make 
use of the music up stairs to dance by. In 
smaller houses, she receives the visits of her 
aforesaid cousin ; and sits down alone, or with 
a fellow maid-servant, to work ; talks of her 
young master or mistress and Mr. Ivins 
(Evans) ; or else she calls to mind her own 
friends in the country ; where she thinks the 
cows and "all that" beautiful, now she is 
away. Meanwhile, if she is lazy, she snuffs the 
candle with her scissars ; or if she has eaten 
more heartily than usual, she sighs double the 
usual number of times, and thinks that tender 
hearts were born to be unhappy. 

Such being the Maid-servant's life in-doors, 
she scorns, when abroad, to be anything but a 
creature of sheer enjoyment. The Maid- 
servant, the sailor, and the school-boy, are the 
three beings that enjoy a holiday beyond all 
the rest of the world ; — and all for the same 
reason, — because their inexperience, peculi- 
arity of life, and habit of being with persons of 
circumstances or thoughts above them, give 
them all, in their way, a cast of the romantic^ 



THE OLD LADY. 



43 



The most active of the money-getters is a 
vegetable compared with them. The Maid- 
servant when she first goes to Vauxhall, thinks 
she is in heaven. A theatre is all pleasure to 
her, whatever is going forward, whether the play 
or the music, or the waiting which makes others 
impatient, or the munching of apples and gin- 
gerbread, which she and her party commence 
almost as soon as they have seated themselves. 
She prefers tragedy to comedy, because it is 
grander, and less like what she meets with in 
general ; and because she thinks it more in 
earnest also, especially in the love-scenes. Her 
favourite play is "Alexander the Great, or the 
Rival Queens?' Another great delight is in 
going a shopping. She loves to look at the 
patterns in the windows, and the fine things 
labelled with those corpulent numerals of 
* only 7s." — " only 6s . 6d." She has also, unless 
born and bred in London, been to see my Lord 
Mayor, the fine people coming out of Court, 
and the " beasties " in the Tower ; and at all 
events she has been to Astley's and the Circus, 
from which she comes away, equally smitten 
with the rider, and sore with laughing at the 
clown. But it is difficult to say what pleasure 
she enjoys most. One of the completest of all 
is the fair, where she walks through an endless 
round of noise, and toys, and gallant appren- 
tices, and wonders. Here she is invited in by 
courteous and well-dressed people, as if she 
were the mistress. Here also is the conjuror's 
booth, where the operator himself, a most 
stately and genteel person all in white, 
calls her Ma'am ; and says to John by her 
side, in spite of his laced hat, " Be good enough, 
sir, to hand the card to the lady." 

Ah ! may her " cousin " turn out as true as 
he says he is ; or may she get home soon 
enough and smiling enough to be as happy 
again next time. 



LXL— THE OLD LADY. 

If the Old Lady is a widow and lives alone, 
the manners of her condition and time of life 
are so much the more apparent. She generally 
dresses in plain silks, that make a gentle 
rustling as she moves about the silence of her 
room ; and she wears a nice cap with a lace 
border, that comes under the chin. In a 
placket at her side is an old enamelled watch, 
unless it is locked up in a drawer of her toilet, 
for fear of accidents. Her waist is rather 
tight and trim than otherwise, as she had a fine 
one when young ; and she is not sorry if you 
see a pair of her stockings on a table, that you 
may be aware of the neatness of her leg and 
foot. Contented with these and other evident 
indications of a good shape, and letting her 
young friends understand that she can afford to 
obscure it a little, she wears pockets, and uses 
them well too. In the one is her handkerchief, 



and any heavier matter that is not likely to 
come out with it, such as the change of a six- 
pence ; in the other is a miscellaneous assort- 
ment, consisting of a pocket-book, a bunch of 
keys, a needle-case, a spectacle-case, crumbs of 
biscuit, a nutmeg and grater, a smelling-bottle, 
and, according to the season, an orange or 
apple, which after many days she draws out, 
warm and glossy, to give to some little child 
that has well behaved itself. She generally 
occupies two rooms, in the neatest condition 
possible. In the chamber is a bed with a white 
coverlet, built up high and round, to look well, 
and with curtains of a pastoral pattern, con- 
sisting alternately of large plants, andshepherds 
and shepherdesses. On the mantle-piece are 
more shepherds and shepherdesses, with dot- 
eyed sheep at their feet, all in coloured ware : 
the man, perhaps, in a pink jacket and knots of 
ribbons at his knees and shoes, holding his 
crook lightly in one hand, and with the other 
at his breast, turning his toes out and looking 
tenderly at the shepherdess : the woman 
holding a crook also, and modestly returning 
his look, with a gipsy-hat jerked up behind, a 
very slender waist, with petticoat and hips to 
counteract, and the petticoat pulled up through 
the pocket-holes, in order to show the trimness 
of her ancles. But these patterns, of course, 
are various. The toilet is ancient, carved at 
the edges, and tied about with a snow-white 
drapery of muslin. Beside it are various 
boxes, mostly japan ; and the set of drawers 
are exquisite things for a little girl to rummage, 
if ever little girl be so bold,- — containing ribbons 
and laces of various kinds ; linen smelling of 
lavender, of the flowers of which there is 
always dust in the corners ; a heap of pocket- 
books for a series of years ; and pieces of dress 
long gone by, such as head-fronts, stomachers, 
and flowered satin shoes, with enormous heels. 
The stock of letters are under especial lock 
and key. So much for the bed-room. In the 
sitting-room is rather a spare assortment of 
shining old mahogany furniture, or carved 
arm-chairs equally old, with chintz draperies 
down to the ground ; a folding or other screen, 
with Chinese figures, their round, little-eyed, 
meek faces perking sideways ; a stuffed bird, 
perhaps in a glass case (a living one is too 
much for her) ; a portrait of her husband over 
the mantel-piece, in a coat with frog-buttons, 
and a delicate frilled hand lightly inserted in 
the waistcoat ; and opposite him on the wall, 
is a piece of embroidered literature, framed 
and glazed, containing some moral distich or 
maxim, worked in angular capital letters, with 
two trees or parrots below, in their proper 
colours ; the whole concluding with an ABC and 
numerals, and the name of the fair industrious, 
expressing it to be "her work, Jan. 14, 1762." 
The rest of the furniture consists of a looking- 
glass with carved edges, perhaps a settee, a 
hassock for the feet, a mat for the little dog, 



44 



THE INDICATOR. 



and a small set of shelves, in which are the 
Spectator and Guardian, the Turkish Spy, a Bible 
and Prayer Book, Young's Wight Thoughts with a 
piece of lace in it to flatten, Mrs. Rowe's Devout 
Exercises of the Heart, Mrs. Glasse's Cookery, and 
perhaps Sir Charles Grandison, and Clarissa. 
John Buncle is in the closet among the pickles 
and preserves. The clock is on the landing- 
place between the two room doors, where it 
ticks audibly but quietly ; and the landing- 
place, as well as the stairs, is carpeted to a 
nicety. The house is most in character, and 
properly coeval, if it is in a retired suburb, and 
strongly built, with wainscot rather than paper 
inside, and lockers in the windows. Before 
the windows should be some quivering poplars. 
Here the Old Lady receives a few quiet visitors 
to tea, and perhaps an early game at cards : or 
you may see her going out on the same kind of 
visit herself, with a light umbrella running up 
into a stick and crooked ivory handle, and her 
little dog, equally famous for his love to her 
and captious antipathy to strangers. Her 
grand-children dislike him on holidays, and the 
boldest sometimes ventures to give him a sly 
kick under the table. When she returns at 
night, she appears, if the weather happens to be 
doubtful, in a calash ; and her servant in 
pattens, follows half behind and half at her 
side, with a lantern. 

Her opinions are not many nor new. She 
thinks the clergyman a nice man. The Duke 
of Wellington, in her opinion, is a very great 
man ; but she has a secret preference for the 
Marquis of Granby. She thinks the young 
women of the present day too forward, and the 
men not respectful enough ; but hopes her 
grandchildren will be better ; though she differs 
with her daughter in several points respecting 
their management. She sets little value on 
the new accomplishments ; is a great though 
delicate connoisseur in butcher's meat and all 
sorts of housewifery ; and if you mention 
waltzes, expatiates on the grace and fine 
breeding of the minuet. She longs to have 
seen one danced by Sir Charles Grandison, 
whom she almost considers as a real person. 
She likes a walk of a summer's evening, but 
avoids the new streets, canals, &c, and some- 
times goes through the church-yard, where her 
children and her husband lie buried, serious, 
but not melancholy. She has had three great 
epochs in her life : — her marriage — her having 
been at court, to see the King and Queen and 
Royal Family — and a compliment on her figure 
she once received, in passing, from Mr. Wilkes, 
whom she describes as a sad, loose man, but 
engaging. His plainness she thinks much ex- 
aggerated. If anything takes her at a distance 
from home, it is still the court ; but she seldom 
stirs, even for that. The last time but one 
that she went, was to see the Duke of Wirtem- 
berg ; and most probably for the last time of 
all. to see the Princess Charlotte and Prince 



Leopold. From this beatific vision she returned 
with the same admiration as ever for the fine 
comely appearance of the Duke of York and 
the rest of the family, and great delight at 
having had a near view of the Princess, whom 
she speaks of with smiling pomp and lifted 
mittens, clasping them as passionately as she 
can together, and calling her, in a transport of 
mixed loyalty and self-love, a fine royal young 
creature, and " Daughter of England." 



LXL— PULCI. 

We present our readers with a prose abridg- 
ment of the beginning of the Morgante Maggiore 
of Pulci, the father of Italian romance. We 
would rather have given it them in verse ; but 
it would have taken more time and attention 
than we can just now afford. Besides, a prose 
specimen of this author, is a less unjust one, 
than it would be of any of his successors ; 
because though a real poet, he is not so eminent 
as a versifier, and deals less in poetical abstrac- 
tions. He has less of the oracular or voiceful 
part of his art, conversing almost exclusively 
with the social feelings in their most familial 
langxiage. 

Luigi Pulci, the younger of three literary 
brothers, was born the 15th of December (3d, 
O.S.), 1431. His family was noble, and pro- 
bably gave their name to the district of Monte 
Pulciano, famous for the supereminence of its 
wine. It was a fit soil for him to grow in. He 
had an enviable lot, with nothing to interrupt 
his vivacity ; passing his life in the shades ot 
ease and retirement, and " warbling his native 
wood-notes wild," without fear of hawks from 
above, or lurking reptiles from below. Among 
his principal friends were, Politian, Lorenzo de 
Medici, and the latter's mother, Lucrezia Tor- 
nabuona. He speaks affectionately of her 
memory at the close of his work. At Lorenzo's 
table he was a constant guest ; and at this 
table, where it is possible that the future pope, 
Leo the Tenth, was present as a little boy, he 
is said to have read, ..as he produced it, that 
remarkable poem, which the old Italian critics 
were not agreed whether to think pious or 
profane.* 

The reader, at this time of day, will be in- 
clined to think it the latter ; nor will the 
reputation of Leo himself, who is said to have 
made use of the word "fable" on a very remark- 
able occasion, be against their verdict. Un- 
doubtedly there was much scepticism in those 
days, as there always must be where there is 
great vivacity of mind, with great demands 
upon its credulity. But we must take care 
how we pronounce upon the real spirit of 

* Leo was born in 1475, forty-four years after the birth 
of Pulci ; so that, supposing the latter to have arrived at 
anything like length of days, he may have had the young 
Father of the Faithful for an auditor. 



PULCI. 



45 



manners unlike our own, when we consider the 
extraordinary mixture of reverence and fami- 
liarity with which the most bigoted periods of 
Catholicism have been accustomed to treat the 
objects of their faith. They elbdw them, till 
they treat them like their earthly kindred, 
expecting most from them, and behaving worst 
by them. Popish sailors have scourged the 
idols, whom they have prayed to the minute 
before for a fair wind. The most laughable 
exposure of the tricks of Roman Catholics in 
our own language is by old Heywood the epi- 
grammatist, who died abroad " in consequence 
of his devotion to the Roman Catholic cause." — 
" The bigotry of any age," says Mr. Hazlitt, 
" is by no means a test of its piety, or even 
sincerity. Men seemed to make themselves 
amends for the enormity of their faith by levity 
of feeling, as well as by laxity of principle ; 
and in the indifference or ridicule with which 
they treated the wilful absurdities and extra- 
vagances to which they hoodwinked their 
understandings, almost resembled children 
playing at blind-man's buff, who grope their 
way in the dark, and make blunders on purpose 
to laugh at their own idleness and folly." — 
Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 
p. 192. It may be added, that they are some- 
times like children playing and laughing at 
ghosts in daylight, but afraid of them at night- 
time. There have not been wanting readers to 
take all Pulci's levity in good religious part. 
This does not seem possible ; but it is possible 
that he may have had a certain conventional 
faith in religion, or even regarded it as a sen- 
timent and a general truth, while the goodness 
of his disposition led him to be ironical upon 
particular dogmas. We must judge him in 
charity, giving him the benefit of our doubts. 

The specimen now laid before the reader is 
perhaps as good a one, for prose, as could have 
been selected. The characteristics of our poet 
are, wildness of fancy, pithiness of humour, 
sprightliness of transition, and tenderness of 
heart. All these, if the reader has any con- 
geniality of spirit, he may find successively in 
the outset about the giants, the complaint made 
of them by the Abbot, the incipient adventures 
of Morgante in his new character, and the 
farewell, and family recognition of the Abbot 
and Orlando. The passages about the falling 
of manna, and the eternal punishment of those 
who are dear to us, furnish the earliest instance 
of that penetration into absurdity, and the 
unconscious matter-of-course air of speaking 
of it, which constitute the humorous part of 
the style of Voltaire. The character of Mar- 
gutte, who makes his appearance in Canto 18, 
and carries this style to its height, is no less 
remarkable as an anticipation of the most im- 
pudent portraits of professed worldliness, and 
seems to warrant the suspicions entertained 
respecting the grosser sceptics of that age, 
while it shows the light in which they were 



regarded by the more refined. In Margutte's 
panegyrics upon what he liked, appear to be 
the seeds of Berni and his followers. One of 
the best things to be said of the serious cha- 
racters of Pulci, and where he has the advantage 
of Ariosto himself, is that you know them with 
more distinctness, and become more personally 
interested in them as people like yourself; 
whereas, in Ariosto, with all his humanity, the 
knights are too much of mere knights, — warlike 
animals. Their flesh and blood is too much 
encrusted by their armour. Even Rubbi, the 
quaint and formal editor of the Parnaso Italiano, 
with all his courtesies towards established 
things, says, in distinguishing the effect of three 
great poets of Italy, that * You will adore 
Ariosto, you will admire Tasso, but you will 
love Pulci." The alliteration suits our critic's 
vivacity better : — "In fine, tu adorerai 1' Ariosto, 
tu ammirerai il Tasso, ma tu amerai il Pulci." 

PROSE TRANSLATION OF THE BEGINNING OF THE 
MORGANTE MAGGIORE. 

— Twelve Paladins (saith the poet) had the 
emperor Charlemagne in his court ; and the 
most wise and famous of them was Orlando. 
It is of him I am about to speak, and of his 
friend Morgante, and of Gan the Traitor, who 
beguiled him to his death in Roncesvalles, 
where he sounded his horn so mightily after 
the Dolorous Rout. 

It was Easter, and Charles had all his court 
with him in Paris, making high feast and 
triumph. There was Orlando, the first among 
them, and Ogier the Dane, and Astolfo the 
Englishman, and Ansuigi : and there came 
Angiotin of Bayonne, and Uliviero, and the 
gentle Berlinghieri ; and there was also Avolio, 
and A vino, and Otho of Normandy, and Richard, 
and the wise Namo, and the aged Salamon, and 
Walter from Monlione, and Baldwin who was 
the son of the wretched Gan. The son of Pepin 
was too happy, and oftentimes fairly groaned 
for joy at seeing all his Paladins together. 

But Fortune stands watching in secret, to 
baffle our designs. While Charles was thus 
hugging himself with delight, Orlando governed 
everything at court, and this made Gan burst 
with envy ; so that he began one day talking 
with Charles after the following manner : — 
" Are we always to have Orlando for our 
master ? I have thought of speaking to you 
about it a thousand times. Orlando has a great 
deal too much presumption. Here are we, 
counts, dukes, and kings, at your service, but 
not at his : and we have resolved not to be 
governed by a boy. You began in Aspramont 
to give him to understand how valiant he was, 
and that he did great things at that fountain ; 
whereas if it had not been for the good Gerard, 
I know very well where the victory would 
have been. The truth is, he has an eye upon 
the crown. This, Charles, is the worthy who 
has deserved so much ! All your generals are 



46 



THE INDICATOR. 



afflicted at it. As for me, I shall repass those 
mountains over which I came to you with 
seventy-two counts. Do you take him for a 
Mars ? " 

Orlando happened to hear these words as he 
sat apart, and it displeased him with Gan that 
he should speak so, but much more that Charles 
should believe him. He would have killed 
Gan, if Uliviero had not prevented him and 
taken his sword Durlindana out of his hand ; 
nay, he could have almost killed Charlemagne 
himself ; but at last he went away from Paris 
by himself, raging with scorn and grief. He 
borrowed as he went, of Ermellina the wife of 
Ogier, the Dane's sword Cortana and his horse 
Rondel, and proceeded on his way to Brava. 
His wife, Alda the Fair, hastened to embrace 
him ; but while she was saying " Welcome my 
Orlando," he was going to strike her with his 
sword, for his head was bewildered, and he took 
her for Ganellone. The fair Alda marvelled 
greatly, but Orlando recollected himself, and 
she took hold of the bridle, and he leaped from 
his horse, and told her all that had passed, and 
rested himself with her for some days. 

He then took his leave, being still carried 
away by his disdain, and resolved to pass over 
into Pagan-land ; and as he rode, he thought, 
every step of the way, of the traitor Gan ; and 
so, riding on wherever the road took him, he 
reached the confines between the Christian 
countries and the Pagan, and came upon an 
abbey, situate in a dark place in a desert. 

Now above the abbey was a great mountain, 
inhabited by three fierce giants, one of whom 
was named Passamonte, another Alabastro, and 
the third Morgante ; and these giants used to 
disturb the abbey, by throwing things down 
upon it from the mountain with slings, so that 
the poor little monks could not go out to fetch 
wood or water. Orlando knocked, but nobody 
would open till the abbot was spoken to. At 
last the abbot came himself, and opening the 
door, bade him welcome. The good man told 
him the reason of the delay, and said that since 
the arrival of the giants, they had been so per- 
plexed that they did not know what to do. 
" Our ancient fathers in the desert," quoth he, 
"were rewarded according to their holiness. 
It is not to be supposed that they lived only upon 
locusts ; doubtless, it also rained manna upon 
them from heaven ; but here one is regaled with 
stones, which the giants rain upon us from the 
mountain. These are our nice bits and relishes. 
The fiercest of the giants, Morgante, plucks up 
pines and other great trees by the roots, and 
casts them on us." While they were talking 
thus in the cemetery, there came a stonej which 
seemed as if it would break Rondel's back. 
" For God's sake, cavalier," said the abbot, 
" come in, for the manna is falling" " My dear 
abbot," answered Orlando, " this fellow, me- 
thinks, does not wish to let my horse feed ; 
he wants to cure him of being restive ; the 



stone seems as if it came from a good arm." 
" Yes," replied the holy father, " I did not 
deceive you. I think, some day or other, they 
will cast the mountain upon us." Orlando 
quieted his horse Rondel, and then sat down to 
a meal ; after which he said, " Abbot, I must 
go and return the present that has been made 
to my horse." The abbot with great tender- 
ness endeavoured to dissuade him, but in vain ; 
upon which he crossed him on the forehead, 
and said, " Go then, and the blessing of God be 
with you." 

Orlando scaled the mountain, and came 
where Passamonte was, who seeing him alone, 
measured him with his eyes and asked him if 
he would stay with him for a page, promising 
to make him comfortable. " Stupid Saracen," 
said Orlando, " I come to you, according to 
the will of God, to be your death, and not 
your foot-boy. You have displeased his ser- 
vants here, and are no longer to be endured, 
dog that you are." 

Non puo piu comportarti, can mastino. 

The giant, finding himself thus insulted, ran 
in a fury to arm him, and returning to Orlando, 
slung at him a large stone, which struck him 
on the head with such force, as not only made 
his helmet ring again, but felled him to the 
earth. Passamonte thought he was dead. 
" What," said he, retiring to disarm himself, 
" could have brought that paltry fellow here?" 

But Christ never forsakes his followers. 
While the giant went to disarm himself, Or- 
lando recovered, and cried aloud, " Giant, 
where are you going ? Do you think that you 
have killed me I Turn back, for unless you 
have wings, you shall not escape me, dog of a 
renegade." The giant greatly marvelling, 
turned back, and stooping to pick up a stone, 
Orlando, who had Cortana naked in his hand, 
cleft his skull ; and cursing Mahomet, the 
giant tumbled, dying and blaspheming, to the 
ground. Blaspheming fell the sour-hearted 
and cruel wretch ; but Orlando, in the mean- 
while, thanked the Father and the Word. 

The Paladin went on, seeking for Alabastro, 
the second giant ; who, when he saw him, 
endeavoured to pluck up a great piece of 
stony earth by the roots. t( Ho, ho !" cried 
Orlando, " what, you think to throw a stone, 
do you ?" Then Alabastro took his sling, and 
flung at him so large a fragment as obliged 
Orlando to defend himself, for if it had struck 
him, he would no more have needed a surgeon ; 
but collecting his strength, he thrust his sword 
into the giant's breast, and the loggerhead fell 
dead. 

Morgante, the third giant, had a palace 
made of earth, and boughs, and shingles, in 
which he shut himself up at night. Orlando 
knocked, and disturbed the giant from his 
sleep, who came staring to the door like a 
madman, for he had had a bewildering dream. 



PULCI. 



47 



" Who knocks there ?" " You will know too 
soon," answered Orlando : " I am come to 
make you do penance for your sins, like your 
brothers. Divine Providence has sent me to 
avenge the wrongs of the monks upon the 
whole set of you ; and I have to tell you, that 
Passamonte and Alabastro are already as cold 
as a couple of pilasters." " Noble knight," 
said Morgante, " do me no ill ; but if you are 
a Christian, tell me in courtesy who you are." 
" I will satisfy you of my faith," replied 
Orlando : " I adore Christ ; and, if you please, 
you may adore him also." 

" I have had a strange vision," replied Mor- 
gante, with a low voice : " I was assailed by a 
dreadful serpent, and called upon Mahomet in 
vain ; then I called upon your God, who was 
crucified, and he succoured me, and I was 
delivered from the serpent ; so I am disposed 
to become a Christian." 

" If you keep in this mind," returned Orlando, 
" you shall worship the true God, and come 
with me and be my companion, and I will love 
you with perfect love. Your idols are false 
and vain ; the true God is the God of the 
Christians. Deny the unjust and villanous 
worship of your Mahomet, and be baptised in 
the name of my God, who alone is worthy." 
" I am content," said Morgante. Then Orlando 
embraced him, and said, " I will lead you to 
the abbey." u Let us go quickly," replied 
Morgante, for he was impatient to make his 
peace with the monks. Orlando rejoiced, saying 
" My good brother, and devout withal, you 
must ask pardon of the abbot ; for God has 
enlightened you, and accepted you, and he 
would have you practise humility." " Yes," 
said Morgante, " thanks to you, your God 
shall henceforth be my God. Tell me your 
name, and afterwards dispose of me as you 
will ;" and he told him that he was Orlando. 

" Blessed Jesus be thanked," said the giant, 
" for I have always heard you called a perfect 
knight ; and as I said, I will follow you all my 
life through." And so conversing they went 
together towards the abbey, and by the way 
Orlando talked with Morgante of the dead 
giants, and sought to console him, saying they 
had done the monks a thousand injuries, and 
our scripture says the good shall be rewarded 
and the evil punished, and we must submit to 
the will of God. " The doctors of our church," 
continued he, " are all agreed, that if those 
who are glorified in heaven, were to feel pity 
for their miserable kindred, who lie in such 
horrible confusion in hell, their beatitude 
would come to nothing ; and this, you see, 
would plainly be unjust on the part of God. 
But such is the firmness of their faith, that 
what appears good to him, appears good to 
them. Do what he may, they hold it to be 
done well, and that it is impossible for him to 
err ; so that if their very fathers and mothers 
are suffering Everlasting punishment, it does 



not disturb them an atom. This is the custom, 
I assure you, in the choirs above." 

" A word to the wise," said Morgante ; 
" you shall see if I grieve for my brethren, 
and whether or no I submit to the will of God, 
and behave myself like an angel. So dust to 
dust ; and now let us enjoy ourselves. I will 
cut off their hands, all four of them, and take 
them to these holy monks, that they may be 
sure they are dead, and not fear to go out 
alone into the desert. They will then be sure 
also that the Lord has purified me, and taken 
me out of darkness, and assured to me the 
kingdom of heaven." So saying, the giant cut 
off the hands of his brethren, and left their 
bodies to the beasts and birds. 

They went to the abbey, where the abbot 
was expecting Orlando in great anxiety ; but 
the monks not knowing what had happened, 
ran to the abbot in great haste and alarm, 
saying, " Will you suffer this giant to come 
in \ " And when the abbot saw the giant, he 
changed countenance. Orlando perceiving him 
thus disturbed, made haste and said, " Abbot, 
peace be with you ! The giant is a Christian : 
he believes in Christ, and has renounced his 
false prophet, Mahomet." And Morgante 
showing the hands in proof of his faith, the 
abbot thanked heaven with great contentment 
of mind. 

The abbot did much honour to Morgante, 
comparing him with St. Paul ; and they rested 
there many days. One day, wandering over 
the abbey, they entered a room where the 
abbot kept a quantity of armour ; and Mor- 
gante saw a bow which pleased him, and he 
fastened it on. Now there was in the place a 
great scarcity of water ; and Orlando said, like 
his good brother, " Morgante, I wish you would 
fetch us some water." " Command me as you 
please," said he ; and placing a great tub upon 
his shoulders, he went towards a spring at 
which he had been accustomed to drink at the 
foot of the mountain. Having reached the 
spring, he suddenly heard a great noise in the 
forest. He took an arrow from the quiver, 
placed it in the bow, and raising his head, saw 
a great herd of swine rushing towards the spring 
where he stood. Morgante shot one of them 
clean through the head, and laid him sprawling. 
Another, as if in revenge, ran towards the 
giant, without giving him time to use another 
arrow ; so he lent him a cuff on the head, which 
broke the bone, and killed him also ; which 
stroke the rest seeing, fled in haste through the 
valley. Morgante then placed the tub full of 
water upon one shoulder and the two porkers 
on the other, and returned to the abbey, which 
was at some distance, without spilling a drop. 

The monks were delighted to see the fresh 
water, but still more to see the pork ; for there 
is no animal to whom food comes amiss. They 
let their breviaries therefore go to sleep awhile, 
and fell heartily to work, so that the cats and 



48 



THE INDICATOR. 



dogs had reason to lament the polish of the 
bones. 

" Now, why do we stay here, doing nothing?" 
said Orlando, one day, to Morgante ; and he 
shook hands with the abbot, and told him he 
must take his leave. " I must go," said he, 
" and make up for lost time. I ought to have 
gone long ago, my good father ; but I cannot 
tell you what I feel within me, at the content 
I have enjoyed here in your company. I shall 
bear in mind and in heart with me for ever, 
the abbot, the abbey, and this desert, so great 
is the love they have raised in me in so short a 
time. The great God, who reigns above, must 
thank you for me, in his own abode. Bestow 
on us your benediction, and do not forget us in 
your prayers." 

When the abbot heard the County Orlando 
talk thus, his heart melted within him for 
tenderness, and he said, " Knight, if we have 
failed in any courtesy due to your prowess and 
great gentleness (and, indeed, what we have 
done has been but little), pray put it to the 
account of our ignorance, and of the place which 
we inhabit. We are but poor men of the 
cloister, better able to regale you with masses, 
and orisons, and paternosters, than with dinners 
and suppers. You have so taken this heart of 
mine by the many noble qualities I have seen 
in you, that I shall be with you still wherever 
you go ; and, on the other hand, you will always 
be present here with me. This seems a con- 
tradiction ; but you are wise, and will take my 
meaning discreetly. You have saved the very 
life and spirit within us ; for so much pertur- 
bation had those giants cast about our place, 
that the way to the Lord among us was blocked 
up. May he who sent you into these woods 
reward your justice and piety, by which we are 
delivered from our trouble ; thanks be to him 
and to you. We shall all be disconsolate at 
your departure. We shall grieve that we 
cannot detain you among us for months and 
years ; but you do not wear these weeds ; you 
bear arms and armour ; and you may possibly 
merit as well, in carrying those, as in wearing 
this cap. You read your Bible, and your virtue 
has been the means of showing the giant the 
way to heaven. Go in peace, and prosper, 
whoever you may be. I do not ask your name ; 
but if ever I am asked who it was that came 
among us, I shall say that it was an angel from 
God. If there is any armour, or other thing 
that you would have, go into the room where 
it is, and take it." " If you have any armour 
that would suit my companion," replied Or- 
lando, " that I will accept with pleasure." 
tt Come and see," said the abbot ; and they 
went into a room that was full of old armour. 
Morgante examined everything, but eould find 
nothing large enough, except a rusty breast- 
plate, which fitted him marvellously. It had 
belonged to an enormous giant, who was killed 
there of old, by Milo of Angrante. There was 



a painting on the wall, which told the whole 
story : how the giant had laid cruel and long 
siege to the abbey ; and how he had been over- 
thrown at last by the great Milo. Orlando 
seeing this, said within himself : — " Oh God ! 
unto whom all things are known, how came 
Milo here, who destroyed this giant ?" And 
reading certain inscriptions which were there, 
he could no longer keep a firm countenance, 
but the tears ran down his cheeks. 

When the abbot saw Orlando weep, and his 
brow redden, and the light of his eyes become 
childlike, for sweetness, he asked him the 
reason ; but finding him still dumbly affected, 
he said, " I do not know whether you are over- 
powered by admiration of what is painted in 
this chamber. You must know that I am of 
high descent, though not through lawful wed- 
lock. I believe I may say, I am nephew or 
sister's son to no less a man than that Rinaldo, 
who was so great a Paladin in the world, though 
my own father was not of a lawful mother. 
Ansuigi was his name ; my own, out in the 
world, was Chiaramonte, and this Milo was my 
father's brother. Ah, gentle baron, for blessed 
Jesus' sake, tell me what name is yours ! " 
Orlando, all glowing with affection, and bathed 
in tears, replied, " My dear abbot and kinsman, 
he before you is your Orlando." Upon this, 
they ran for tenderness into each other's arms, 
weeping on both sides with a sovereign affection, 
which was too high to be expressed. The abbot 
was so overjoyed that he seemed as if he would 
never have done embracing Orlando. " By 
what fortune," said the knight, " do I find you 
in this obscure place ? Tell me, my dear father, 
how was it you became a monk, and did not 
follow arms, like myself and the rest of us ? " 

" It is the will of God," replied the abbot, 
hastening to give his feelings utterance. 
" Many and divers are the paths he points 
out for us, by which to arrive at his city : 
some walk it with the sword, some with the 
pastoral staff. Nature makes the inclination 
different, and therefore there are different 
ways for us to take ; enough if we all arrive 
safely at one and the same place, the last as 
well as the first. We are all pilgrims through 
many kingdoms. We all wish to go to Rome, 
Orlando ; but we go picking out our journey 
through different roads. Such is the trouble 
in body and soul brought upon us by that sin 
of the old apple. Day and night am I here 
with my book in hand ; day and night do you 
ride about, holding your sword, and sweating 
oft both in sun and shadow, and all to get 
round at last to the home from which we 
departed — I say all out of anxiety and hope, 
to get back unto our home of old." And the 
giant hearing them talk of these things, shed 
tears also. 



MY BOOKS. 



49 



LXIL— MY BOOKS*. 

Sitting, last winter, among my books, and 
walled round with all the comfort and protec- 
tion which they and my fire-side could afford 
me ; to wit, a table of high-piled books at my 
back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some 
shelves on the other, and the feeling of the 
warm fire at my feet ; I began to consider how 
I loved the authors of those books : how I 
loved them, too, not only for the imaginative 
pleasures they afforded me, but for their 
making me love the very books themselves, 
and delight to be in contact with them. I 
looked sideways at my Spenser, my Theocritus, 
and my Arabian Nights; then above them at 
my Italian poets ; then behind me at my Dry- 
den and Pope, my romances, and my Boccaccio ; 
then on my left side at my Chaucer, who lay on a 
writing-desk ; and thought how natural it was 
in C. L. to give a kiss to an old folio, as I once 
saw him do to Chapman's Homer. At the same 
time I wondered how he could sit in that front 
room of his with nothing but a few unfeeling 
tables and chairs, or at best a few engravings 
in trim frames, instead of putting a couple of 
arm-chairs into the back-room with the books 
in it, where there is but one window. Would 
I were there, with both the chairs properly 
filled, and one or two more besides ! " We 
had talk, Sir," — the only talk capable of making 
one forget the books. 

I entrench myself in my books equally 
against sorrow and the weather. If the wind 
comes through a passage, I look about to see 
how I can fence it off by a better disposition 
of my moveables ; if a melancholy thought is 
importunate, I give another glance at my Spenser. 
When I speak of being in contact with my 
books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my 
head against them. Living in a southern 
climate, though in a part sufficiently northern 
to feel the winter, I was obliged, during that 
•season, to take some of the books out of the 
study, and hang them up near the fire-place 
in the sitting-room, which is the only room 
that has such a convenience. I therefore 
walled myself in, as well as I could, in the 
manner above-mentioned. I took a walk every 
day, to the astonishment of the Genoese, who 
used to huddle against a bit of sunny wall, like 
flies on a chimney-piece ; but I did this only 
that I might so much the more enjoy my En- 
glish evening. The fire was a wood fire instead 
of a coal ; but I imagined myself in the country. 
I remembered at the very worst, that one end 
of my native land was not nearer the other 
than England is to Italy. 

While writing this article I am in my study 
again. Like the rooms in all houses in this 
country which are not hovels, it is handsome 

* This and the following paper was written during the 
author's residence in Italy. The use of the first person 
singular instead of plural, was involuntary. 
[part II.] 



and ornamented. On one side it looks towards 
a garden and the mountains ; on another, to the 
mountains and the sea. What signifies all 
this ? I turn my back upon the sea ; I shut up 
even ope of the side windows looking upon the 
mountains, and retain no prospect but that of 
the trees. On the right and left of me are 
book-shelves ; a book-case is affectionately 
open in front of me ; and thus kindly inclosed 
with my books and the green leaves, I write. 
If all this is too luxurious and effeminate, of 
all luxuries it is the one that leaves you the 
most strength. And this is to be said for scholar- 
ship in general. It unfits a man for activity, 
for his bodily part in the world ; but it often 
doubles both the power and the sense of his 
mental duties ; and with much indignation 
against his body, and more against those who 
tyrannise over the intellectual claims of man- 
kind, the man of letters, like the magician of 
old, is prepared " to play the devil " with the 
great men of this world, in a style that 
astonishes both the sword and the toga. 

I do not like this fine large study. I like 
elegance. I like room to breathe in, and even 
walk about, when I want to breathe and 
walk about. I like a great library next my 
study ; but for the study itself, give me a 
small snug place, almost entirely walled with 
books. There should be only one window in 
it, looking upon trees. Some prefer a place 
with few, or no books at all — nothing but a 
chair or a table, like Epictetus ; but I should 
say that these were philosophers, not lovers 
of books, if I did not recollect that Mon- 
taigne was both. He had a study in a round 
tower, walled as aforesaid. It is true, one 
forgets one's books while writing — at least 
they say so. For my part, I think I have 
them in a sort of sidelong mind's eye ; like a 
second thought, which is none — like a water- 
fall, or a whispering wind. 

I dislike a grand library to study in. I 
mean an immense apartment, with books all 
in Museum order, especially wire-safed. I say 
nothing against the Museum itself, or public 
libraries. They are capital places to go to, 
but not to sit in ; and talking of this, I hate to 
read in public, and in strange company. The 
jealous silence ; the dissatisfied looks of the 
messengers ; the inability to help yourself ; 
the not knowing whether you really ought to 
trouble the messengers, much less the gentleman 
inblack,or brown, who is, perhaps, half a trustee ; 
with a variety of other jarrings between privacy 
and publicity, prevent one's settling heartily to 
work. They say " they manage these things 
better in France ;" and. I dare say they do ; 
but I think I should feel still more distrait in 
France, in spite of the benevolence of the servi- 
tors, and the generous profusion of pen, ink,and 
paper. I should feel as if I were doing nothing 
but interchanging amenities with polite writers. 

A grand private library, which the master of 



50 



THE INDICATOR. 



the house also makes his study, never looks to 
me like a real place of books, much less of 
authorship. I cannot take kindly to it. It is 
certainly not out of envy ; for three parts of 
the books are generally trash, and I can seldom 
think of the rest and the proprietor together. 
It reminds me of a fine gentleman, of a collector, 
of a patron, of Gil Bias and the Marquis of 
Marialva ; of anything but genius and comfort. 
I have a particular hatred of a round table 
(not the Round Table, for that was a dining 
one) covered and irradiated with books, and 
never met with one in the house of a clever 
man but once. It is the reverse of Montaigne's 
Round Tower. Instead of bringing the books 
around you, they all seem turning another way, 
and eluding your hands. 

Conscious of my propriety and comfort in 
these matters, I take an interest in the book- 
cases as well as the books of my friends. 
I long to meddle, and dispose them after my 
own notions. When they see this confession, 
they will acknowledge the virtue I have prac- 
tised. I believe I did mention his book-room 
to C. L. and I think he told me that he often 
sat there when alone. It would be hard not to 
believe him. His library, though not abound- 
ing in Greek or Latin (which are the only 
things to help some persons to an idea of litera- 
ture), is anything but superficial. The depth 
of philosophy and poetry are there, the inner- 
most passages of the human heart. It has 
some Latin too. It has also a handsome con- 
tempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, 
a selection made at precious intervals from the 
book-stalls; — now a Chaucer at nine and two- 
pence ; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas 
Browne at two shillings ; now a Jeremy Tay- 
lor ; a Spinoza ; an old English Dramatist, 
Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney ; and the books 
are " neat as imported." The very perusal of 
the backs is a a discipline of humanity." There 
Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old 
Radical friend : there Jeremy Collier is at 
peace with Dryden : there the lion, Martin 
Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, 
Sewell : there Guzman d'Alfarache thinks 
himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, 
and has his claims admitted. Even the " high 
fantastical" Duchess of Newcastle, with her 
laurel on her head, is received with grave 
honours, and not the less for declining to 
trouble herself with the constitutions of her 
maids. There is an approach to this in the 
library of W. C. who also includes Italian 
among his humanities. W. H., I believe, has 
no books, except mine ; but he has Shaksp.eare 
and Rousseau by heart. N., who though not a 
book-man by profession, is fond of those who 
are, and who loves his volume enough to read 
it across the fields, has bis library in the com- 
mon sitting-room, which is hospitable. H. R.'s 
books are all too modern and finely bound, 
which however is not his fault, for they were 



left him by will,— not the most kindly act of 
the testator. Suppose a man were to bequeath 
us a great japan chest three feet by four, with 
an injunction that it was always to stand on 
the tea-table. I remember borrowing a book 
of H. R. which, having lost, I replaced with a 
copy equally well bound. I am not sure I 
should have been in such haste, even to return 
the book, had it been a common-looking volume; 
but the splendour of the loss dazzled me into 
this ostentatious piece of propriety. I set 
about restoring it as if I had diminished his 
fortunes, and waived the privilege a friend has 
to use a man's things as his own. I may 
venture upon this ultra-liberal theory, not only 
because candour compels me to say that I hold it 
to a greater extent, with Montaigne, but because 
I have been a meek son in the family of book- 
losers. I may affirm, upon a moderate calcula- 
tion, that I have lent and lost in my time, (and 
lam eight-and-thirty), half-a-dozen decent-sized 
libraries, — I mean books enough to fill so many 
ordinary book-cases. I have never complained ; 
and self-love, as well as gratitude, makes me 
love those who do not complain of me. 

I own I borrow books with as much facility 
as I lend. I cannot see a work that interests 
me on another person's shelf, without a wish 
to carry it off : but, I repeat, that I have been 
much more sinned against than sinning in the 
article of non-return ; and am scrupulous in 
the article of intention. I never had a felonious 
intent upon a book but once ; and then I shall 
only say, it was under circumstances so pecu- 
liar, that I cannot but look upon the conscience 
that induced me to restore it, as having sacri- 
ficed the spirit of its very self to the letter ; 
and I have a grudge against it accordingly. 
Some people are unwilling to lend their books. 
I have a special grudge against them, particu- 
larly those who accompany their unwillingness 
with uneasy professions to the contrary, and 
smiles like Sir Fretful Plagiary. The friend 
who helped to spoil my notions of property, or 
rather to make them too good for the world 
" as it goes," taught me also to undervalue my 
squeamishness in refusing to avail myself of 
the books of these gentlemen. He showed me 
how it was doing good to all parties to put an 
ordinary face on the matter ; though I know 
his own blushed not a little sometimes in doing 
it, even when the good to be done was for 
another. I feel, in truth, that even when anger 
inclines me to exercise this privilege of philo- 
sophy, it is more out of revenge than contempt. 
I fear that in allowing myself to borrow books, 
I sometimes make extremes meet in a very 
sinful manner, and do it out of a refined revenge. 
It is like eating a miser's beef at him. 

I yield to none in my love of bookstall 
urbanity. I have spent as happy moments 
over the stalls, as any literary apprentice boy 
who ought to be moving onwards. But I con- 
fess my weakness in liking to see some of my 



MY BOOKS. 



51 



favourite purchases neatly bound. The books 
I like to have about me most are, Spenser, 
Chaucer, the minor poems of Milton, the 
Arabian Nights, Theocritus, Ariosto, and such 
old good-natured speculations as Plutarch's 
Morals. For most of these I like a plain good 
old binding, never mind how old, provided it 
wears well ; but my Arabian Nights may be 
bound in as fine and flowery a style as possible, 
and I should love an engraving to every dozen 
pages. Book-prints of all sorts, bad and good, 
take with me as much as when I was a child : 
and I think some books, such as Prior's Poems, 
ought always to have portraits of the authors. 
Prior's airy face with his cap on, is like having 
his company. From early association, no 
edition of Milton pleases me so much, as that 
in wnich there are pictures of the Devil with 
brute ears, dressed like a Roman General : 
nor of Bunyan, as the one containing the print 
of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with the 
Devil whispering in Christian's ear, or old 
Pope by the way side, and 

" Vanity Fair, 
With the Pilgrims suffering there." 

I delight in the recollection of the puzzle I 
used to have with the frontispiece of the Tale 
of a Tub, of my real horror at the sight of that 
crawling old man representing Avarice, at 
the beginning of Enfield's Speaker, the Looking- 
Glass, or some such book ; and even of the 
careless school-boy hats, and the prim sto- 
machers and cottage bonnets, of such golden- 
age antiquities as the Village School. The 
oldest and most worn-out woodcut, represent- 
ing King Pippin, Goody Two Shoes, or the 
grim Soldan, sitting with three staring blots 
for his eyes and mouth, his sceptre in one 
hand, and his other five fingers raised and 
spread in admiration at the feats of the Gallant 
London Prentice, cannot excite in me a feeling 
of ingratitude. Cooke's edition of the British 
Poets and Novelists came out when I was at 
school : for which reason I never could put up 
with Suttaby's or Walker's publications, except 
in the case of such works as the Fairy Tales, 
which Mr. Cooke did not publish. Besides, 
they are too cramped, thick, and mercenary ; 
and the pictures are all frontispieces. They 
do not come in at the proper places. Cooke 
realised the old woman's beau ideal of a prayer- 
book, — " A little book, with a great deal of 
matter, and a large type : " — for the type was 
really large for so small a volume. Shall I 
ever forget his Collins and his Gray, books at 
once so * superbly ornamented " and so incon- 
ceivably cheap ? Sixpence could procure much 
before ; but never could it procure so much as 
then, or was at once so much respected, and so 
little cared for. His artist Kirk was the best 
artist, except Stothard, that ever designed for 
periodical works ; and I will venture to add 
(if his name rightly announces his country) the 
best artist Scotland ever produced, except 



Wilkie, but he unfortunately had not enough 
of his country in him to keep him from dying 
young. His designs for Milton and the Arabian 
Nights, his female extricated from the water in 
the Tales of the Genii, and his old hag issuing 
out of the chest of the Merchant Abadah in 
the same book, are before me now, as vividly 
as they were then. He possessed elegance and 
the sense of beauty in no ordinary degree ; 
though they sometimes played a trick or so of 
foppery. I shall never forget the gratitude 
with which I received an odd number of 
Akenside, value sixpence, one of the set of 
that poet, which a boarder distributed among 
three or four of us, " with his mother's com- 
pliments." The present might have been more 
lavish, but I hardly thought of that. I remem- 
ber my number. It was the one in which 
there is a picture of the poet on a sofa, with 
Cupid coming to him, and the words under- 
neath, " Tempt me no more, insidious Love ! " 
The picture and the number appeared to me 
equally divine. I cannot help thinking to this 
day, that it is right and natural in a gentleman 
to sit in a stage dress, on that particular kind 
of sofa, though on no other, with that exclusive 
hat and feathers on his head, telling Cupid to 
begone with a tragic air. 

I love an author the more for having been 
himself a lover of books. The idea of an 
ancient library perplexes our sympathy by its 
map-like volumes, rolled upon cylinders. Our 
imagination cannot take kindly to a yard of 
wit, or to thirty inches of moral observation, 
rolled out like linen in a draper's shop. But 
we conceive of Plato as of a lover of books ; 
of Aristotle certainly ; of Plutarch, Pliny, 
Horace, Julian, and Marcus Aurelius. Virgil, 
too, must have been one ; and, after a fashion, 
Martial. May I confess, that the passage 
which I recollect with the greatest pleasure in 
Cicero, is where he says that books delight us 
at home, and are no impediment abroad ; travel 
with us, ruralise with us. His period is rounded 
off to some purpose : " Delectant domi, non impe- 
diunt foris ; peregrinantur, rusticantur." I am so 
much of this opinion, that I do not care to be 
anywhere without having a book or books at 
hand, and like Dr. Orkborne, in the novel of 
Camilla, stuff the coach or post-chaise with 
them whenever I travel. As books, however, 
become ancient, the love of them becomes 
more unequivocal and conspicuous. The 
ancients had little of what we call learning. 
They made it. They were also no very emi- 
nent buyers of books — they made books for 
posterity. It is true, that it is not at all 
necessary to love many books, in order to love 
them much. The scholar, in Chaucer, who 
would rather have 

At his beddes head 
A twenty bokes, clothed, in black and red, 
Of Aristotle and his philosophy, 
Than robes rich, or fiddle, or psaltrie,— 
e 2 



52 



THE INDICATOR. 



doubtless beat all our modern collectors in his 
passion for reading ; but books must at least 
exist, and have acquired an eminence, before 
their lovers can make themselves known. 
There must be a possessioD, also, to perfect 
the communion ; and the mere contact is 
much, even when our mistress speaks an 
unknown language. Dante puts Homer, the 
great ancient, in his Elysium, upon trust ; but 
a few years afterwards, Homer, the book, made 
its appearance in Italy, and Petrarch, in a 
transport, put it upon his book-shelves, where 
he adored it, like "the unknown God." Pe- 
trarch ought to be the god of the bibliomaniacs, 
for he was a collector and a man of genius, 
which is a union that does not often happen. 
He copied out, with his own precious hand, 
the manuscripts he rescued from time, and 
then produced others for time to reverence. 
With his head upon a book he died. Boccaccio, 
his friend, was another ; nor can one look upon 
the longest and most tiresome works he wrote 
(for he did write some tiresome ones, in spite 
of the gaiety of his Decameron), without think- 
ing, that in that resuscitation of the world of 
letters, it must have been natural to a man of 
genius to add to the existing stock of volumes, 
at whatsoever price. I always pitch my com- 
pletest idea of a lover of books, either in these 
dark ages, as they are called, 

(Cui cieco a torto il cieco volgo appella—) 

or in the gay town days of Charles II., or a 
little afterwards. In both times the portrait 
comes out by the force of contrast. In the 
first, I imagine an age of iron warfare and 
energy, with solitary retreats, in which the 
monk or the hooded scholar walks forth to 
meditate, his precious volume under his arm. 
In the other, I have a triumphant example of 
the power of books and wit to contest the 
victory with sensual pleasure : — Rochester, 
staggering home to pen a satire in the style of 
Monsieur Boileau ; Butler, cramming his jolly 
duodecimo with all the learning that he laughed 
at ; and a new race of book poets come up, 
who, in spite of their periwigs and petit- 
maitres, talk as romantically of " the bays," 
as if they were priests of Delphos. It was a 
victorious thing in books to beguile even the 
old French of their egotism, or at least to 
share it with them. Nature never pretended 
to do as much. And here is the difference 
between the two ages, or between any two 
ages in which genius and art predominate. 
In the one, books are loved because they are 
the records of nature and her energies ; in the 
other, because they are the records of those 
records, or evidences of the importance of the 
individuals, and proofs of our descent in the 
new and imperishable aristocracy. This is 
the reason why rank (with few exceptions) is 
so jealous of literature, and loves to appropri- 
ate or withhold the honours of it, as if they 



were so many toys and ribbons, like its own. 
It has an instinct that the two pretensions are 
incompatible. When Montaigne (a real lover 
of books) affected the order of St. Michael, and 
pleased himself with possessing that fugitive 
little piece of importance, he did it because he 
would pretend to be above nothing that he 
really felt, or that was felt by men in general ; 
but at the same time he vindicated his natural 
superiority over this weakness by praising and 
loving all higher and lasting things, and by 
placing his best glory in doing homage to the 
geniuses that had gone before him. He did 
not endeavour to think that an immortal 
renown was a fashion, like that of the cut of 
his scarf; or that by undervaluing the one, 
he should go shining down to posterity in the 
other, perpetual lord of Montaigne and of the 
ascendant. 

There is a period of modern times, at which 
the love of books appears to have been of a 
more decided nature than at either of these — 
I mean the age just before and after the 
Reformation, or rather all that period when 
book-writing was confined to the learned lan- 
guages. Erasmus is the god of it. Bacon, a 
mighty book-man, saw, among his other sights, 
the great advantage of loosening the verna- 
cular tongue, and wrote both Latin and English. 
I allow this is the greatest closeted age of 
books ; of old scholars sitting in dusty studies ; 
of heaps of " illustrious obscure," rendering 
themselves more illustrious and more obscure 
by retreating from the " thorny queaches " of 
Dutch and German names into the "vacant 
interlunar caves " of appellations latinised or 
translated. I think I see all their volumes 
now, filling the shelves of a dozen German 
convents. The authors are bearded men, sit- 
ting in old woodcuts, in caps and gowns, and 
their books are dedicated to princes and states- 
men, as illustrious as themselves. My old 
friend Wierus, who wrote a thick book, De 
Prcestigiis Dcemonum, was one of them, and had a 
fancy worthy of his sedentary stomach. I will 
confess, once for all, that I have a liking for 
them all. It is my link with the bibliomaniacs, 
whom I admit into our relationship, because 
my love is large, and my family pride nothing. 
But still I take my idea of books read with a 
gusto, of companions for bed and board, from 
the two ages before-mentioned. The other is 
of too book- worm a description. There must 
be both a judgment and a fervour ; a discri- 
mination and a boyish eagerness ; and (with 
all due humility) something of a point of con- 
tact between authors worth reading and the 
reader. How can I take Juvenal into the 
fields, or Yalcarenghius De Aortas Aneurismate 
to bed with me ? How could I expect to walk 
before the face of nature with the one ; to tire 
my elbow properly with the other, before I 
put out my candle, and turn round deliciously 
on the right side ? Or how could I stick up 



MY BOOKS. 



53 ! 



Coke upon Littleton against something on the 
dinner-table, and be divided between a fresh 
paragraph and a mouthful of salad ? 

I take our four great English poets to have 
all been fond of reading. Milton and Chaucer 
proclaim themselves for hard sitters at books. 
Spenser's reading is evident by his learning ; 
and if there were nothing else to show for it in 
Shakspeare, his retiring to his native town, long 
before old age, would be a proof of it. It is im- 
possible for a man to live in solitude without 
such assistance, unless he is a metaphysician 
or mathematician, or the dullest of mankind ; 
and any country town would be solitude to 
Shakspeare, after the bustle of a metropolis and 
a theatre. Doubtless he divided his time be- 
tween his books, and his bowling-green, and his 
daughter Susanna. It is pretty certain, also, 
that he planted, and rode on horseback ; and 
there is evidence of all sorts to make it clear, 
that he must have occasionally joked with the 
blacksmith, and stood godfather for his neigh- 
bours' children. Chaucer's account of himself 
must be quoted, for the delight and sympathy 
of all true readers : — 

And as for me, though that I can but lite, 

On bookes for to rede I me delite, 

And to hem yeve I faith and full credence, 

And in mine herte have hem in reverence 

So hertely, that there is game none, 

That fro my bookes maketh me to gone, 

But it is seldome on the holy daie ; 

Save certainly whan that the month of May 

Is com en, and that I hear the foules sing, 

And that the floures ginnen for to spring. 

Farewell my booke and my devocion. 

Tlie Legend of Good Women. 

And again, in the second book of his House of 
Fame, where the eagle addresses him : — 



-Thou wilt make 



At night full oft thine head to ake, 
And in thy study as thou writest, 
And evermore of Love enditest, 
In honour of him and his praisings, 
And in his folkes furtherings, 
And in his matter all devisest, 
And not him ne his folke despisest, 
Although thou mayst go in the daunse 
Of hem, that him list not advance ; 
Therefore as I said, ywis, 
Jupiter considreth well this. 
And also, beausire, of other things ; 
That is, thou hast no tidings 
Of Loves folke, if they be glade, 
Ne of nothing else that God made, 
And not only fro ferre countree, 
But no tidings commen to thee, 
Not of thy very neighbouris, 
That dwellen almost at thy dores ; 
Thou hearest neither that ne this, 
For whan thy labour all done is, 
And hast made all thy rekenings, * 
Instead of rest and of new things, 
Thou goest home to thine house anone, 
And all so dombe as anie stone, 
Thou sittest at another booke, 
Till fully dazed is thy looke. 

* Chaucer at this time had an office under the govern- 
ment. 



After I think of the bookishness of Chaucer 
and Milton, I always make a great leap to 
Prior and Fenton. Prior was first noticed, 
when a boy, by Lord Dorset, sitting in his 
uncle's tavern, and reading Horace. He de- 
scribes himself, years after, when Secretary of 
Embassy at the Hague, as taking the same 
author with him in the Saturday's chaise, in 
which he and his mistress used to escape from 
town cares into the country, to the admiration 
of Dutch beholders. Fenton was a martyr to 
contented scholarship (including a sirloin and 
a bottle of wine), and died among his books, of 
inactivity. " He rose late," says Johnson, 
" and when he had risen, sat down to his books 
and papers." A woman that once waited on 
him in a lodging, told him, as she said, that he 
would "lie a-bed and be fed with a spoon." 
He must have had an enviable liver, if he was 
happy. I must own (if my conscience would 
let me), that I should like to lead, half the 
year, just such a life (woman included, though 
not that woman), the other half being passed 
in the fields and woods, with a cottage just big 
enough to hold us. Dacier and his wife had a 
pleasant time of it ; both fond of books, both 
scholars, both amiable, both wrapt up in the 
ancient world, and helping one another at their 
tasks. If they were not happy, matrimony 
would be a rule even without an excep ion. 
Pope does not strike me as being a bookman ; 
he was curious rather than enthusiastic ; more 
nice than wise ; he dabbled in modern Latin 
poetry, which is a bad symptom. Swift was 
decidedly a reader ; the Tale of a Tub, in its 
fashion as well as substance, is the work of a 
scholarly wit ; the Battle of the Books is the 
fancy of a lover of libraries. Addison and 
Steele were too much given up to Button's and 
the town. Periodical writing, though its 
demands seem otherwise, is not favourable to 
reading ; it becomes too much a matter of 
business, and will either be attended to at the 
expense of the writer's books, or books, the 
very admonishers of his industry, will make 
him idle. Besides, a periodical work, to be 
suitable to its character, and warrant its 
regular recurrence, must involve something of 
a gossiping nature, and proceed upon experi- 
ences familiar to the existing community, or at 
least likely to be received by them in conse- 
quence of some previous tinge of inclination. 
You do not pay weekly visits to your friends 
to lecture them, whatever good you may do 
their minds. There will be something compul- 
sory in reading the Ramblers, as there is in 
going to church. Addison and Steele under- 
took to regulate the minor morals of society, 
and effected a world of good, with which 
scholarship had little to do. Gray was a book- 
man ; he wished to be always lying on sofas, 
reading " eternal new novels of Crebillon and 
Marivaux." This is a true hand. The elabo- 
rate and scientific look of the rest of his 



54 



THE INDICATOR. 



reading was owing to the necessity of employ- 
ing himself : he had not health and spirits for 
the literary voluptuousness he desired. Collins, 
for the same reason, could not employ himself; 
he was obliged to dream over Arabian tales, to 
let the light of the supernatural world half in 
upon his eyes. " He loved," as Johnson says, 
(in that strain of music, inspired by tenderness,) 
u fairies, genii, giants, and monsters ; he de- 
lighted to rove through the meanders of en- 
chantment, to gaze on the magnificence of 
golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of 
Elysian gardens." If Collins had had a better 
constitution, I do not believe that he would 
have written his projected work upon the 
Restoration of Literature, fit as he was by scholar- 
ship for the task, but he would have been the 
greatest poet since the days of Milton. If his 
friend Thomas Warton had had a little more 
of his delicacy of organisation, the love of 
books would almost have made him a poet. 
His edition of the minor poems of Milton is a 
wilderness of sweets. It is the only one in 
which a true lover of the original can pardon 
an exuberance of annotation ; though I confess 
I am inclined enough to pardon any notes that 
resemble it, however numerous. The " builded 
rhyme" stands at the top of the page, like a fair 
edifice with all sorts of flowers and fresh waters 
at its foot. The young poet lives there, served 
by the nymphs and fauns. 

Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades. 
Hue ades, o forniose puer : tibi lilia plenis 
Ecce ferunt nymphae calathis : tibi Candida Nais 
Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens, 
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi. 

Among the old writers I must not forget 
Ben Jonson and Donne. Cowley has been 
already mentioned. His boyish love of books, 
like all the other inclinations of his early life, 
stuck to him to the last ; which is the greatest 
reward of virtue. I would mention Izaak 
Walton, if I had not a grudge against him. 
His brother fishermen, the divines, were also 
great fishers of books. I have a grudge against 
them and their divinity. They talked much of 
the devil and divine right, and yet forgot what 
Shakspeare says of the devil's friend Nero, 
that he is " an angler in the lake of darkness." 
Selden was called " the walking library of our 
nation." It is not the pleasantest idea of him ; 
but the library included poetry, and wit, as 
well as heraldry and the Jewish doctors. His 
Table Talk is equally pithy and pleasant, and 
truly worthy of the name, for it implies other 
speakers. Indeed it was actually what it is 
called, and treasured up by his friends. Selden 
wrote complimentary verses to his friends the 
poets, and a commentary on Drayton's Poly- 
olbion. Drayton was himself a reader, addicted 
to all the luxuries of scholarship. Chapman 
sat among his books, like an astrologer among 
his spheres and altitudes. 

How pleasant it is to reflect, that all these 



lovers of books have themselves become books! 
"What better metamorphosis could Pythagoras 
have desired ! How Ovid and Horace exulted 
in anticipating theirs ! And how the world 
have justified their exultation ! They had a 
right to triumph over brass and marble. It is 
the only visible change which changes no 
farther ; which generates and yet is not de- 
stroyed. Consider : mines themselves are 
exhausted ; cities perish ; kingdoms are swept 
away, and man weeps with indignation to think 
that his own body is not immortal. 

Muoiono le citta, muoiono i regni, 

E 1' uom d' esser mortal par che si sdegni. 

Yet this little body of thought, that lies 
before me in the shape of a book, has existed 
thousands of years, nor since the invention of 
the press can anything short of an universal 
convulsion of nature abolish it. To a shape 
like this, so small yet so comprehensive, so 
slight yet so lasting, so insignificant yet so 
venerable, turns the mighty activity of Homer, 
and so turning, is enabled to live and warm 
us for ever. To a shape like this turns the 
placid sage of Academus : to a shape like 
this the grandeur of Milton, the exuberance of 
Spenser, the pungent elegance of Pope, and 
the volatility of Prior. In one small room, 
like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be 
gathered together 

The assembled souls of all that men held wise. 

May I hope to become the meanest of these ex- 
istences ? This is a question which every author 
who is a lover of books, asks himself some time 
in his life ; and which must be pardoned, 
because it cannot be helped. I know not. I 
cannot exclaim with the poet, 

Oh that my name were number'd among theirs, 
Then gladly would I end my mortal days. 

For my mortal days, few and feeble as the rest 
of them may be, are of consequence to others. 
But I should like to remain visible in this 
shape. The little of myself that pleases myself, 
I could wish to be accounted worth pleasing 
others. I should like to survive so, were it 
only for the sake of those who love me in 
private, knowing as I do what a treasure is the 
possession of a friend's mind, when he is no 
more. At all events, nothing while I live and 
think, can deprive me of my value for such 
treasures. I can help the appreciation of them 
while I last, and love them till I die ; and 
perhaps, if fortune turns her face once more in 
kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, 
some quiet day, to lay my overheating temples 
on a book, and so have the death I most 
envy. 



BEES, BUTTERFLIES, &c. 



55 



LXIIL— BEES, BUTTERFLIES, &c. 

WITH THE CONSIDERATION OF A CURIOUS ARGUMENT, 
DRAWN FROM THE GOVERNMENT OF THE HIVE. 

Alexander said, that if lie were not Alex- 
ander, he should wish to be Diogenes. Reader, 
what sort of animal would you be, if you were 
obliged to be one, and were not a man ? 

Irish Reader : — A woman. 

Oh, ho ! The choice is judicious, but not to 
the purpose, " you divil :" — we mean, out of 
the pale of the species. Consider the question, 
dear readers, and answer it to your friends 
and consciences. The pastime is pretty, and 
fetches out the character. Nor is there any- 
thing in it unworthy the dignity of your 
humanity, as that liberal term may show us, 
without farther reasons. Animals partake with 
us the gifts of song, and beauty, and the affec- 
tions. They beat us in some things, as in the 
power of flight. The dove has the wings of the 
aDgel. The meanest reptile has eyes and limbs, 
as well as Nicholas, emperor of all the Russias. 
Sir Philip Sydney tells us of a riding-master at 
Vienna, who expatiated so eloquently on the 
qualities of the noble animal he had to deal 
with, that he almost persuaded our illustrious 
countryman to wish himself a horse. A year 
or two back, everybody in London that had a 
voice, was resolved upon being " a butterfly, 
born in a bower :" and Goldsmith had such a 
tendency to sympathise with the least sym- 
pathetic part of the creation, that he took a 
pleasure in fancying himself writing an auto- 
biography offish. It was the inconsiderate laugh 
of Johnson, upon his mention of it, that pro- 
duced that excellent retort on the Doctor's 
grandiosity of style : " If you were to describe 
little fish conversing, you would make them 
talk like great whales." 

How different from the sensations of man- 
kind, with its delicate skin and apprehensive 
fingers, must be those of feathered and scaled 
animals, of animals with hoofs and claws, and 
of such creatures as beetles and other insects, 
who live in coats of mail, have twenty feet a 
piece, and hundreds of eyes ! A writer who 
should make these creatures talk, would be 
forced, in spite of his imagination, to write parts 
of his account in a jargon, in order to typify 
what he could not express. What must be 
their sensations when they awake ; when they 
spin webs ; when they wrap themselves up in 
the chrysalis ; when they stick for hours 
together on a wall or a pane of glass, apparently 
stupid and insensible ? What may not the 
eagle see in the sky, beyond the capabilities of 
our vision ? And on the other hand, what 
possibilities of visible existence round about 
them may they not realise ; what creatures not 
cognisable by our senses ? There is reason to 



believe in the existence of myriads of earthly 
creatures, who are not conscious of the presence 
of man. Why may not man be unconscious 
of others, even at his side \ There are minute 
insects that evidently know nothing of the 
human hand that is close to them ; and millions 
in water and in air that apparently can have 
no conception of us. As little may our five 
senses be capable of knowing others. But 
what, it may be asked, is the good of these 
speculations ! To enlarge knowledge, and 
vivify the imagination. The universe is not 
made up of hosiery and the three per cents. ; 
no, nor even of the Court Gtdde. 

Sir Thomas Browne would not have thought 
it beneath him to ask what all those innume- 
rable little gentry (we mean the insects) are 
about, between our breakfast and dinner ; how 
the time passes in the solitudes of America, or 
the depths of the Persian gulf ; or what they 
are doing even, towards three in the afternoon, 
in the planet Mercury. Without going so far 
as that for an enlargement of our being, it will 
do us no harm to sympathise with as many 
creatures as we can. It gives us the privilege 
of the dervise, who could pitch himself into the 
animals he killed, and become a stag or a bird. 
We know not what sort of a fish Goldsmith 
could have made of himself. La Fontaine's 
animals are all La Fontaine, at least in their 
way of talking. As far as luxury goes, and a 
total absence from human cares, nobody has 
painted animal enjoyment better than the most 
luxurious of poets, Spenser, in the description 
of his Butterfly. La Fontaine called himself 
the Butterfly of Parnassus ; but we defy him 
to have produced anything like the abundance 
and continuity of the following picture, which 
is exuberant to a degree that makes our as- 
tonishment run over in laughter. It seems as 
if it would never leave off. We quote the 
whole of it, both on this account, and because 
we believe it to be unique of the kind. Ovid 
himself is not so long nor so fine in any one of 
his descriptions, which are also not seldom 
misplaced — a charge that does not attach here : 
and Marino, another exuberant genius of the 
south of Italy, is too apt to run the faults of 
Ovid to seed, without having some of his good 
qualities. Spenser is describing a butterfly, 
bound upon his day's pleasure. A common 
observer sees one of these beautiful little crea- 
tures flutter across a garden, thinks how pretty 
and sprightly it is, and there his observation 
comes to an end. Now mark what sort of 
report a poet can give in, even of the luxuries 
of a fly : — 

Thus the fresh Clarion, being readie dight, 
Unto his journey did himselfe addresse, 

And with good speed began to take his flight 
Over the fields, in Msfranke lustinesse ,- 

And all the champaine o'er he soared light, 
And all the countrey wide he did possesse, 

Feeding upon then- pleasures bounteouslie, 

That none gainsaid, nor none did him envie. 



5G 



THE INDICATOR. 



The woods, the rivers, and the medowes greene. 
With his aire-cutting wings he measured wide, 

Ne did he leave the mountaines hare unseene, 
Nor the ranke grassie fennes delights untride. 

But none of these, however sweet they beene, 
Mote please his fancie, nor him cause t' abide : 

His choicefull sense with every change doth flit : 

No common things may please a wavering wit. 

To the gay gardins his unstaid desire 

Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights : 

There lavish Nature, in her best attire, 

Powres forth sweet odors and alluring sights ; 

And Arte, with her contending, doth aspire 
T'excell the naturall with made delights: 

And all, that faire or pleasant may be found, 

In riotous excesse doth there abound. 

There he arriving, round about doth flie, 

From bed to bed, from one to t' other border ; 

And takes survey, with curious busie eye, 
Of every flowre and herbe there set in order ; 

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, 
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, 

Ne with his feete their silken leaves deface, 

But pastures on the pleasures of each place. 

And evermore, with most varietie, 

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) 
He casts his glutton sense to satisfie, 

Now sucking of the sap of herbe most meet, 
Or of the dew, which yet on them does lie ; 

Now in the same bathing his tender feet: 
And then he percheth on some branch thereby, 
To weather him, and his moyst wings to dry. 

And then again he turneth to his play, 
To spoil the pleasures of that paradise ; 

The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray, 
Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes, 

The roses raigning in the pride of Map, 

Sharp hyssop good for green wounds remedies, 

Faire marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, 

Sweet marjoram, and daysies decking prime. 

Cool violets, and orpine growing still, 
Embathed balm, and chearful galingale, 

Fresh costmarie, and breathfull camomill, 
Dull poppy, and drink-quickening setuale, 

Veyne-healing verven, and head-purging dill, 
Sound savorie, and basil hartie-hale, 

Fat coleworts, and comforting perseline, 

Cool lettuce, and refreshing rosmarine ; 

And whatso else of vertue good or ill 

Grew in this gardin, fetch' d from far away, 

Of every one he takes, and tastes at will, 
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey. 

Then when he hath both plaid, and fed at fill, 
In the warme sunne he doth himselfe embay, 

And there him rests in riotous suffisaunce 

Of all his gladfulness, and kingly joy aunce. 

Nothing, it might be supposed, could be said 
after this : and yet the poet strikes up a ques- 
tion, in a tone like a flourish of trumpets, after 
this royal dinner : — 

What more felicitie can fall to creature, 

Than to enjoy delight with libertie 
And to be lord of all the workes of Nature ? ■ 

To r eigne in the aire from th' earth to highest skie, 
To feed on flowers, and weedes of glorious feature? 

To take whatever thing doth please the eye? 
Who rests not pleased with such happiness, 
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." 

Amen, thou most satisfying of poets ! But 
when are human beings to be as well off in 



that matter as the butterflies ? or how are you 
to make them content, should the time come 
when they have nothing to earn ? However, 
there is a vast deal to be learned from the poet's 
recommendation, before we need ask either of 
those questions. We may enjoy a great deal 
more innocent " delight with liberty" than we 
are in the habit of doing ; and may be lords, if 
not of " all the works of nature," of a great 
many green fields and reasonable holidays. It 
seems a mighty thing to call a butterfly " lord 
of all the works of nature." Many lords, who 
have pretensions to be butterflies, have no pre- 
tensions as wide as those. And, doubtless, 
there is a pleasant little lurking of human pride 
and satire in +he poet's eye, notwithstanding 
his epical impartiality, when he talks thus of 
the universal empire of his hero. And yet 
how inferior are the grandest inanimate works 
of nature, to the least thing that has life 
in it ! The oaks are mighty, and the hills 
mightier ; yet that little participation of the 
higher spirit of vitality, which gifts the butter- 
fly with locomotion, renders him unquestionable 
lord of the oaks and the hills. He does what 
he pleases with them, and leaves them with a 
spurn of his foot. 

Another beauty to be noted in the above 
luxurious lines, is the fine sense with which 
the poet makes his butterfly fond of things not 
very pleasant to our human apprehension — 
such as bitter herbs, and " rank, grassy fens." 
And like a right great poet, he makes no apology 
for saying so much about so little a creature. 
Man may be made a very little creature to a 
very great apprehension, yet we know what a 
world of things he contains ; and all who par- 
take of his senses are sharers of his importance. 
The passions and faculties which render us of 
consequence to one another, render the least 
thing that breathes of consequence in the eyes 
of the poet, who is the man that sees fair play 
among all the objects of the creation. A 
poetaster might be afraid to lower his little 
muse, by making her notice creatures hardly 
less than herself: the greater the poet, the 
more godlike his impartiality. Homer draws 
his similes, as Jupiter might have done, from 
some of the homeliest animals. The god made 
them, and therefore would have held them in 
due estimation : the poet (IIomjt^s, the Maker) 
remakes them, and therefore contemplates them 
in a like spirit. Old Kit Marlowe, who, as 
Drayton says — 

" Had in him those brave sublunary things 
That the first poets had," 

ventures, in some play of his, upon as true and 
epic a simile as ever was written, taken from 
no mightier a sphere than one of his parlour 
windows : — 

" Untameable as flies." 

Imagine the endeavour to tame a fly I It is 
obvious that there is no getting at him : he 



BEES, BUTTERFLIES, &c. 



57 



does not comprehend you : he knows nothing 
about you : it is doubtful, in spite of his large 
eyes, whether he even sees you ; at least to 
any purpose of recognition. How capriciously 
and provokingly he glides hither and thither ! 
What angles and diagrams he describes in his 
locomotion, seemingly without any purpose ! 
He will peg away at your sugar, but stop him 
who can when he has done with it. Thumping 
(if you could get some fairy-stick that should 
do it without killing) would have no effect on 
a creature, who shall bump his head half the 
morning against a pane of glass, and never 
learn that there is no getting through it. Soli- 
tary imprisonment would be lost on the incom- 
prehensible little wretch, who can stand still 
with as much pertinacity as he can bustle 
about, and will stick a whole day in one pos- 
ture. The best thing to be said of him is, that 
he is as fond of cleaning himself as a cat, doing 
it much in the same manner ; and that he often 
rubs his hands together with an appearance 
of great energy and satisfaction. 

After all, Spenser's picture of the butterfly's 
enjoyments is not complete, entomologically. 
The luxury is perfect ; but the reader is not 
sure that it is all proper butterfly luxury, and 
that the man does not mix with it. It is 
not the definite, exclusive, and characteristic 
thing desiderated by Goldsmith. The butter- 
fly, perhaps, is no fonder of " bathing his feet," 
than we should be to stick in a tub of treacle. 
And we ought to hear more of his antennae and 
his feathers (for his wings are full of them), 
and the way in which they modify, or become 
affected by his enjoyments. 

But on the other hand, the inability, in 
these sympathies with our fellow-creatures, to 
divest ourselves of an overplus of one's human 
nature, gives them a charm by the very imper- 
fection. We cannot leave our nature behind 
us when we enter into their sensations. We 
must retain it, by the very reason of our sym- 
pathy ; and hence arises a pleasant incongruity, 
allied to other mixtures of truth and fiction. 
One of the animals which a generous and soci- 
able man would soonest become, is a dog. A 
dog can have a friend ; he has affections and 
character, he can enjoy equally the field and 
the fireside ; he dreams, he caresses, he pro- 
pitiates ; he offends, and is pardoned ; he stands 
by you in adversity ; he is a good fellow. We 
would sooner be a dog than many of his masters. 
And yet what lover of dogs, or contemner of 
his own species, or most trusting reader of 
Ovid, could think with comfort of suddenly 
falling on all-fours, and scampering about with 
his nose to the ground ! Who would like to 
lap when he was thirsty ; or, as Marvell pre- 
tended his hungry poet did — 

" With griesly tongue to dart the passing flies ? " 

Swift might have fancied, when he wrote his 
Houhhynnms, that he could fain have been a 



horse ; yet he was obliged to take human vir- 
tues along with him, even to adorn his rebukers 
of humanity ; and in fancying ourself a horse 
after his fashion, who can contemplate with 
satisfaction the idea of trotting to an evening 
party in a paddock, inviting them to a dinner 
of oats, or rubbing one's meditative chin with 
a hoof? The real horse is a beautiful and 
spirited, but we fear not a very intelligent or 
sensitive animal, at least not in England. The 
Arabian, brought up with his master's family, 
is of another breeding, and seems to attain to 
higher faculties ; but in Europe, the horse ap- 
pears to be content with as few ideas as a do- 
mestic animal can well have. Who would like 
to stand winking, as he does for hours, at a man's 
door, moving neither to the right nor the left ? 
There is some companionship in a coach-horse; 
and old " Indicator " readers know the respect 
we entertain on that account for the veriest 
hacks : but it would be no stretch of ambition 
in the greatest lover of animals to prefer being 
a horse to any other. One of its pleasantest 
occupations would be carrying a lady ; but 
then, pleasant as it would be to us, humanly, 
we should be dull to it, inasmuch as we were 
a horse. A monkey is too like a man in some 
things to be endurable as an identification with 
us. We shudder at the humiliation of the 
affinity. A monkey, in his feather and red 
jacket, as he is carried about the streets, eager- 
faced yet indifferent — looks like a melancholy, 
little, withered old man, cut down to that 
miniature size by some freak of the super- 
natural. What say you, reader, to being a 
hog ? Horrible ! You could not think of it : 
— you are too great a lover of the graces and 
the green fields. True ; — yet there are not a 
few respectable, perhaps even reverend per- 
sonages, who, to judge from their tastes in or- 
dinary, would have no such horror. Next to 
eating pork, they may surely think there would 
be a pleasure in pork, eating. Sheep, goats, 
cattle of all sorts, have their repulsive aspect 
in this question, Among all our four-footed 
acquaintances, the deer seem to carry it, next 
the dog ; their shapes are so elegant, and places 
of resort so poetical ; yet, like cattle, their 
lives seem but dull ; — and there is the hunts- 
man, who is the devil. Fancy the being com- 
pelled to scamper away from Tomkins, one of 
the greatest fools in existence, at the rate of 
twenty miles an hour, with the tears running 
down your face, and your heart bursting ! 

No, dear and grave, and at the same time 
most sprightly and miscellaneous reader, one 
would rather be a bird than a beast.* Birds 
neither offend us by any revolting similarity, 
nor repel us by a dissimilarity that is frightful ; 
their songs, their nests, their courtship, their 
vivacity, give them a strong moral likeness to 
some of our most pleasing characteristics ; and 

* Since writing this, I have a doubt in favour of the 
squirrel. 



58 



THE INDICATOR. 



they have an advantage over us, which forms 
one of the desires of our most poetical dreams 
i — they fly. To be sure, in spite of what is said 
of doves (who, by the way, are horribly jealous, 
and beat one another), beaks and kissing do 
not go so well together as lips ; neither would 
it be very agreeable to one's human head to be 
eternally jerking on this side and that, as if on 
guard against an enemy ; but this, we suppose, 
only takes place out of the nest, and in the 
neighbourhood of known adversaries. The 
songs, the wings, the flight, the rising of the 
lark, the luxurious wakefulness of the night- 
ingale, the beauty of a bird's movements, his 
infantine quickness of life, are all charming to 
the imagination. " O that I had the wings of 
a dove ! " said the royal poet in his affliction ; 
" then would I fly away, and be at rest !" He 
did not think only of the " wings " of the dove ; 
he thought of its nest, its peacefulness, its soli- 
tude, its white freedom from the soil of care 
and cities, and wished to be the dove itself. 

It has been thought however, that of all ani- 
mated creation, the bees present the greatest 
moral likeness to man ; not only because they 
labour, and lay up stores, and live in communi- 
ties, but because they have a form of govern- 
ment and a monarchy. Virgil immortalised 
them after a human fashion. A writer in the 
time of Elizabeth, probably out of compliment 
to the Virgin Queen, rendered them dramatis 
personce, and gave them a whole play to them- 
selves. Above all, they have been held up to 
us, not only as a likeness, but as " a great moral 
lesson ;" and this, not merely with regard to 
the duties of occupation, but the form of their 
polity. A monarchical government, it is said, 
is natural to man, because it is an instinct of 
nature : the very bees have it. 

It may be worth while to inquire a moment 
into the value of this argument ; not as affect- 
ing the right and title of our Sovereign Lord 
King William the Fourth (whom, with the 
greatest sincerity, we hope God will preserve !), 
but for its own sake, as well as for certain little 
collateral deductions. And, in the first place, 
we cannot but remark how unfairly the ani- 
mal creation are treated, with reference to 
the purposes of moral example. "We degrade 
or exalt them, as it suits the lesson we desire 
to inculcate. If we rebuke a drunkard or a 
sensualist, we think we can say nothing severer 
to him than to recommend him not to make 
a "beast of himself;" which is very unfair 
towards the beasts, who are no drunkards, 
and behave themselves as Nature intended. 
A horse has no habit of drinking ; he does not 
get a red face with it. The stag does not go 
reeling home to his wives. On the other hand, 
we are desired to be as faithful as a dog, as 
bold as a lion, as tender as a dove ; as if the 
qualities denoted by these epithets were not to be 
found among ourselves. But above all, the bee 
is the argument. Is not the honey-bee, we are 



asked, a wise animal ? — We grant it. — " Doth 
he not improve each passing hour ?" — He is 
pretty busy, it must be owned — as much occu- 
pied at eleven, twelve, and one o'clock, as if his 
life depended on it. — Does he not lay up stores ; 
— He does. — Is he not social ? — Does he not 
live in communities ?— There can be no doubt 
of it. — Well, then, he has a monarchical govern- 
ment ; and does not that clearly show that a 
monarchy is the instinct of nature ? Does it 
not prove, by an unerring rule, that the only 
form of government in request among the 
obeyers of instinct, is the only one naturally 
fitted for man ? 

In answering the spirit of this question, we 
shall not stop to inquire how far it is right as 
to the letter, or how many different forms of 
polity are to be found among other animals, 
such as the crows, the beavers, the monkeys ; 
neither shall we examine how far instinct is 
superior to reason, or why the example of man 
himself is to go for nothing. We will take for 
granted, that the bee is the wisest animal of all, 
and that it is a judicious thing to consider his 
manners and customs, with reference to their 
adoption by his inferiors, who keep him in 
hives. This naturally leads us to inquire, 
whether we could not frame all our systems of 
life after the same fashion. We are busy, like 
the bee ; we are gregarious, like him ; we 
make provision against a rainy day ; we are 
fond of flowers and the country ; we occasion- 
ally sting, like him ; and we make a great noise 
about what we do. Now, if we resemble the 
bee in so many points, and his political instinct 
is so admirable, let us reflect what we ought to 
become in other respects, in order to attain to 
the full benefit of his example. 

In the first place having chosen our monarch 
(who by the way, in order to complete the like- 
ness, ought always to be a queen — which is a 
thing to which the Tories will have no objec- 
tion), we must abolish our House of Lords and 
Commons ; for the bees have unquestionably, 
no such institutions. This would be a little 
awkward for many of the stoutest advocates of 
the monarchical principle, who, to say the truth, 
often behave as if they would much rather 
abolish the monarch than themselves. But so 
it must be ; and the worst of it is, that although 
the House of Commons would have to be 
abolished, as well as the House of Lords, the 
Commons or Commonalty are nevertheless the 
only persons besides the sovereign who would 
exercise power ; and these Commons would be 
the working classes ! 

We shall show this more particularly, and 
by some very curious examples, in a moment. 
Meantime we must dispose of the Aristocracy ; 
for though there is no House of Lords in a bee- 
hive, there is a considerable Aristocracy, and 
a very odd body they are. We doubt whether 
the Dukes of Newcastle and Buccleugh would 
like to change places with them. There is, it 



BEES, BUTTERFLIES, &c. 



59 



is true, no little resemblance between the 
Aristocracy of the hive and that of human 
communities. They are called Drones, and ap- 
pear to have nothing to do but to feed and sleep. 
We have just been doubting whether the 
celebrated phrase, fruges consumere nati, born to 
consume the fruits of the earth, is in Juvenal's 
Satires or Virgil's Georgics, so like in this respect 
are the aristocracy of the bee-hive and certain 
consumers of tithes and taxes. At all events, 
they are a body who live on the labour of 
others. 

" Armento ignavo, e che non vuol fatica." 

But the likeness has been too often remarked 
to need dwelling upon. Not so two little 
exceptions to the likeness ; namely the occa- 
sional selection of a patriarch from their body ; 
and the massacre of every man John of them 
once a-year ! Yet of these we must not lose 
sight, if we are to take example of bee- 
policy. A lover, then, or ex-officio husband, is 
occasionally taken out of their number, and 
becomes Prince of Denmark to the Queen 
Anne of the hive, but only for an incredibly 
short period, and for the sole purpose of keep- 
ing alive the nation ; for her Majesty is a 
princess of a very virtuous turn of mind, a 
pure Utilitarian, though on a throne ; and 
apparently has the greatest indifference, if not 
contempt, afterwards, and at all other times, 
for this singular court-officer and his peers. 
Nay, there is not only reason to believe, that 
like the fine lady in Congreve, 

" She stares upon the strange man's face, 
Like one she ne'er had known ; " 

but some are of opinion, that the poor lord 
never recovers it ! He dies at the end of a 
few days, out of sheer insignificance, though 
perhaps the father of no less than twelve thou- 
sand children in the space of two months ! It 
is not safe for him to have known such exalta- 
tion, as was sometimes the case with the lovers 
of goddesses. How the aristocracy in general 
feel, on occasion of their brother's death, we 
have no means of judging ; but we fancy them 
not a little alarmed, and desirous of waiving 
the perilous honour. And yet they appear to 
exist and to be numerous, solely in order to 
eat and drink, and furnish this rare quota of 
utility ; for which the community are so little 
grateful, that once a-year they hunt the whole 
body to death, and kill them with their stings. 
Drones, be it observed, have no stings ; they do 
not carry swords, as the gentry once did in 
Europe, when it was a mark of their rank. 
Those, strange to tell ! are the ornaments of 
the bee working-classes. It is thought, in 
Hivedom, that they only are entitled to have 
weapons, who create property. 

But we have not yet got half through the 
wonders which are to modify human conduct 
by the example of this wise, industrious, and 
monarchy-loving people. Marvellous changes 



must be effected, before we have any general 
pretension to resemble them, always excepting 
in the aristocratic particular. For instance, 
the aristocrats of the hive,howeverunmasculine 
in their ordinary mode of life, are the only 
males. The working-classes, like the sove- 
reign, are all females ! How are we to man- 
age this ? "We must convert, by one sudden 
metamorphosis, the whole body of our agricul- 
tural and manufacturing population into 
women ! Mrs. Cobbett must displace her hus- 
band, and tell us all about Indian corn. There 
must be not a man in Nottingham, except the 
Duke of Newcastle ; and he trembling, lest 
the Queen should send for him. The tailors, 
bakers, carpenters, gardeners, &c. must all be 
Mrs. Tailors and Mrs. Bakers. The very name 
of John Smith must go out. The Directory 
must be Amazonian. This Commonalty of 
women must also be, at one and the same time, 
the operatives, the soldiers, the virgins, and 
the legislators, of the country ! They must 
make all we want, fight all our enemies, and 
even get up a Queen for us, when necessary ; 
for the sovereigns of the hive are often of 
singular origin, being manufactured ! literally 
"made to order," and that, too, by dint of 
their eating ! They are fed and stuffed into 
royalty ! The receipt is, to take any ordinary 
female bee in its infancy, put it into a royal 
cradle or cell, and feed it with a certain kind 
of jelly ; upon which its shape alters into that 
of sovereignty, and her Majesty issues forth, 
royal by the grace of stomach. This is no 
fable, as the reader may see on consulting any 
good history of bees. In general, several 
Queen-bees are made at a time, in case of 
accidents ; but each, on emerging from her 
apartment, seeks to destroy the other, and one 
only remains living in one hive. The others 
depart at the head of colonies, like Dido. 

To sum up, then, the condition of human 
society, were it to be remodelled after the 
example of the bee, let us conclude with 
drawing a picture of the state of our beloved 
country, so modified. Imprimis, all our work- 
ing people would be females, wearing swords, 
never marrying, and occasionally making queens. 
They would grapple with their work in a pro- 
digious manner, and make a great noise. 

Secondly, our aristocracy would be all males, 
never working, never marrying (except when 
sent for), always eating or sleeping, and annually 
having their throats cut. The bee-massacre 
takes place in July, when accordingly all our 
nobility and gentry would be out of town, 
with a vengeance ! The women would draw 
their swords, and hunt and stab them all about 
the west end, till Brompton and Bays water 
would be choked with slain. 

Thirdly, her Majesty the Queen would either 
succeed to a quiet throne, or, if manufactured, 
would have to eat a prodigious quantity of 
jelly in her infancy : and so, after growing into 



(JO 



THE INDICATOR. 



proper sovereign condition, would issue forth, 
and begin her reign either with killing her 
royal sisters, or leading forth a colony to 
America or New South Wales. She would 
then take to husband some noble lord for the 
space of one calendar hour, and dismissing 
him to his dulness, proceed to lie in of 12,000 
little royal highnesses in the course of the 
eight following weeks, with others too nume- 
rous to mention ; all which princely genera- 
tion, with little exception, would forthwith 
give up their title, and divide themselves into 
lords or working- women, as it happened ; and 
so the story would go round to the end of the 
chapter, bustling, working, and massacreing. 
And here ends the sage example of the Mon- 
archy of the Bees. 

We must observe, nevertheless, before we 
conclude, that however ill and tragical the 
example of the bees may look for human imi- 
tation, we are not to suppose that the fact is 
anything like so melancholy to themselves. 



Perhaps it is no evil at all, or only so for the 
moment. The drones, it is true, seem to have 
no fancy for being massacred ; but we have no 
reason to suppose that they, or any of the rest 
concerned in this extraordinary instinct, are 
aware of the matter beforehand ; and the 
same is to be said of the combats between the 
Queen Bees — they seem to be the result of an 
irresistible impulse, brought about by the sud- 
den pressure of a necessity. Bees appear to 
be very happy during far the greater portion 
of their existence. A modern writer, of whom 
it is to be lamented that a certain want of 
refinement stopped short his perceptions, and 
degraded his philosophy from the finally expe- 
dient into what was fugitively so, has a passage 
on this point, as agreeable as what he is speak- 
ing of. " A bee among the flowers in spring," 
says Dr. Paley, "is one of the cheerfullest 
objects that can be looked upon. Its life 
appears to be all enjoyment, so busy and so 



THE COMPANION 



The first quality in a Companion is Truth." 

Sir W. Tejniplb. 



I.— AN EARTH UPON HEAVEN. 

Somebody, a little while ago, wrote an 
excellent article in the New Monthly Magazine 
on " Persons one would wish to have known." 
He should write another on " Persons one 
could wish to have dined with." There is 
Rabelais, and Horace, and the Mermaid roys- 
ters, and Charles Cotton, and Andrew Marvell, 
and Sir Richard Steele, cum multis aliis : and 
for the colloquial, if not the festive part, Swift 
and Pope, and Dr. Johnson, and Burke, and 
Home Tooke. What a pity one cannot dine 
with them all round ! People are accused of 
having earthly notions of heaven. As it is 
difficult to have any other, we may be par- 
doned for thinking that we could spend a very 
pretty thousand years in dining and getting 
acquainted with all the good fellows on record ; 
and having got used to them, we think we 
could go very well on, and be content to wait 
some other thousands for a higher beatitude. 
Oh, to wear out one of the celestial lives of a 
triple century's duration, and exquisitely to 
grow old, in reciprocating dinners and teas 
with the immortals of old books ! Will Field- 
ing " leave his card " in the next world ? Will 
Berkeley (an angel in a wig and lawn sleeves ! ) 
come to ask how Utopia gets on ? Will Shak- 
speare (for the greater the man, the more the 
good-nature might be expected) know by in- 
tuition that one of his readers (knocked up 
with bliss) is dying to see him at the Angel 
and Turk's Head, and come lounging with his 
hands in his doublet-pockets accordingly ? 

It is a pity that none of the great geniuses, 
to whose lot it has fallen to describe a future 
state, has given us his own notions of heaven. 
Their accounts are all modified by the national 
theology ; whereas the Apostle himself has 
told us, that we can have no conception of the 
blessings intended for us. "Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard," &c. After this, Dante's 
shining lights are poor. Milton's heaven, with 



the armed youth, exercising themselves in 
military games, is worse. His best Paradise 
was on earth, and a very pretty heaven he 
made of it. For our parts, admitting and 
venerating as we do the notion of a heaven 
surpassing all human conception, we trust 
that it is no presumption to hope, that the 
state mentioned by the Apostle is the final 
heaven ; and that we may ascend and gradually 
accustom ourselves to the intensity of it, by 
others of a less superhuman nature. Familiar 
as we are both with joy and sorrow, and 
accustomed to surprises and strange sights of 
imagination, it is difficult to fancy even the 
delight of suddenly emerging into a new and 
boundless state of existence, where everything 
is marvellous, and opposed to our experience. 
We could wish to take gently to it ; to be 
loosed not entirely at once. Our song desires 
to be "a song of degrees." Earth and its 
capabilities — are these nothing? And are 
they to come to nothing ? Is there no beau- 
tiful realisation of the fleeting type that is 
shown us? No body to this shadow? No 
quenching to this taught and continued thirst ? 
No arrival at these natural homes and resting- 
places, which are so heavenly to our imagina- 
tions, even though they be built of clay, and 
are situate in the fields of our infancy ? We 
are becoming graver than we intended ; but to 
return to our proper style : — nothing shall 
persuade us, for the present, that Paradise 
Mount, in any pretty village in England, has 
not another Paradise Mount to correspond, in 
some less perishing region ; that is to say, 
provided anybody has set his heart upon it : — 
and that we shall not all be dining, and drink- 
ing tea, and complaining of the weather (we 
mean, for its not being perfectly blissful) three 
hundred years hence, in some snug interlunar 
spot, or perhaps in the moon itself, seeing that 
it is our next visible neighbour, and shrewdly 
susjpected of being hill and dale. 



t>2 



THE COMPANION. 



It appears to us, that for a certain term of 
centuries, Heaven must consist of something of 
this kind. In a word, we cannot but persuade 
ourselves, that to realise everything that we 
have justly desired on earth, will be heaven ; 
— we mean, for that period : and that after- 
wards, if we behave ourselves in a proper 
pre-angelical manner, we shall go to another 
heaven, still better, where we shall realise all 
that we desired in our first. Of this latter we 
can as yet have no conception ; but of the 
former, we think some of the items may be as 
follow : — 

Imprimis, — (not because friendship comes 
before love in point of degree, but because it 
precedes it, in point of time, as at school we 
have a male companion before we are old 
enough to have a female) — Imprimis then, a 
friend. He will have the same tastes and 
inclinations as ourselves, with just enough 
difference to furnish argument without sharp- 
ness ; and he will be generous, just, entertain- 
ing, and no shirker of his nectar. In short, he 
will be the best friend we have had upon earth. 
We shall talk together " of afternoons ; " and 
when the Earth begins to rise (a great big 
moon, looking as happy as we know its inha- 
bitants will be), other friends will join us, not 
so emphatically our friend as he, but excellent 
fellows all ; and we shall read the poets, and 
have some sphere-music (if we please), or 
renew one of our old earthly evenings, picked 
out of a dozen Christmases. 

Item, a mistress. In heaven (not to speak it 
profanely) we know, upon the best authority, 
that people are "neither married nor given 
in marriage ; " so that there is nothing illegal 
in the term. (By the way, there can be no 
clergymen there, if there are no official duties 
for them. We do not say, there will be 
nobody who has been a clergyman. Berkeley 
would refute that ; and a hundred Welsh 
curates. But they would be no longer in 
orders. They would refuse to call themselves 
more Reverend than their neighbours.) Item 
then, a mistress ; beautiful, of course, — an 
angelical expression, — a Peri, or Houri, or 
whatever shape of perfection you choose to 
imagine her, and yet retaining the likeness of 
the woman you loved best on earth ; in fact, 
she herself, but completed ; all her good quali- 
ties made perfect, and all her defects taken 
away (with the exception of one or two charm- 
ing little angelical peccadilloes, which she can 
only get rid of in a post-future state) ; good- 
tempered, laughing, serious, fond of everything 
about her without detriment to her special 
fondness for yourself, a great roamer in Elysian 
fields and forests, but not alone (they go in 
pairs there, as the jays and turtle-doves do 
with us) ; but above all things, true ; oh, so 
true, that you take her word as you would a 
diamond, nothing being more transparent, or 
solid, or precious. Between writing some 



divine poem, and meeting our friends of an 
evening, we should walk with her, or fly (for 
we should have wings, of course) like a couple 
of human bees or doves, extracting delight 
from every flower, and with delight filling 
every shade. There is something too good in 
this to dwell upon ; so we spare the fears and 
hopes of the prudish. We would lay her head 
upon our heart, and look more pleasure into 
her eyes, than the prudish or the profligate 
ever so much as fancied. 

Item, books. Shakspeare and Spenser should 
write us new ones ! Think of that. We would 
have another Decameron : and Walter Scott 
(for he will be there too ; — we mean to beg 
Hume to introduce us) shall write us forty 
more novels, all as good as the Scotch ones ; 
and Radical as well as Tory shall love him. 
It is true, we speak professionally, when we 
mention books. 

We think, admitted to that equal sky, 
The Arabian Nights must bear us company. 

When Gainsborough died, he expired in a 
painter's enthusiasm, saying, " We are all 
going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the party." 
— He had a proper foretaste. Virgil had the 
same light, when he represented the old heroes 
enjoying in Elysium their favourite earthly 
pursuits ; only one cannot help thinking, with 
the natural modesty of reformers, that the taste 
in this our interlunar heaven will be benefited 
from time to time by the knowledge of new- 
comers. We cannot well fancy a celestial 
ancient Briton delighting himself with paint- 
ing his skin, or a Chinese angel hobbling a 
mile up the Milky Way in order to show her- 
self to advantage. 

For breakfast, we must have a tea beyond 
anything Chinese. Slaves will certainly not 
make the sugar ; but there will be cows for 
the milk. One's landscapes cannot do without 
cows. 

For horses we shall ride a Pegasus, or 
Ariosto's Hippogriff, or Sinbad's Roc. We 
mean, for our parts, to ride them all, having a 
passion for fabulous animals. Fable will be 
no fable then. We shall have just as much 
of it as we like ; and the Utilitarians will be 
astonished to find how much of that sort of 
thing will be in request. They will look very 
odd, by the bye, — those gentlemen, when they 
first arrive ; but will soon get used to the 
delight, and find there was more of it in their 
own doctrine than they imagined. 

The weather will be extremely fine, but not 
without such varieties as shall hinder it from 
being tiresome. April will dress the whole 
country in diamonds ; and there will be 
enough cold in winter to make a fire pleasant 
of an evening. The fire will be made of 
sweet-smelling turf and sunbeams ; but it will 
have a look of coal. If we choose, now and 
then we shall even have inconveniences. 



BAD WEATHER. 



63 



II.— EAD WEATHER. 

After longing these two months for some 
" real winter weather," the public have had a 
good sharp specimen, a little too real. "We 
mean to take our revenge by writing an article 
upon it after a good breakfast, with our feet 
at a good fire, and in a room quiet enough to 
let us hear the fire as well as feel it. Outside 
the casement (for we are writing this in a 
cottage) the east-wind is heard, cutting away 
like a knife ; snow is on the ground ; there is 
frost and sleet at once; and the melancholy 
crow of poor chanticleer at a distance seems 
complaining that nobody will cherish him. 
One imagines that his toes must be cold ; and 
that he is drawing comparisons between the 
present feeling of his sides, and the warmth 
they enjoy next his plump wife on a perch. 

But in the country there is always some- 
thing to enjoy. There is the silence, if nothing 
else ; you feel that the air is healthy ; and you 
can see to write. Think of a street in London, 
at once narrow, foggy, and noisy; the snow 
thawing, not because the frost has not returned, 
but because the union of mud and smoke 
prevails against it; and then the unnatural 
cold sound of the clank of milk-pails (if you 
are up early enough) ; or if you are not, the 
chill, damp, strawy, rickety hackney-coaches 
going by, with fellows inside of them with 
cold feet, and the coachman a mere bundle of 
rags, blue nose, and jolting. (He'll quarrel 
with every fare, and the passenger knows it, 
and will resist. So they will stand with their 
feet in the mud, haggling. The old gentleman 
saw an extra charge of a shilling in his face.) 
To complete the misery, the pedestrians kick, 
as they go, those detestable flakes of united 
snow and mud ; — at least they ought to do so, 
to complete our picture; and at night-time, 
people coming home hardly know whether or 
not they have chins. 

But is there no comfort then in a London 
street in such weather? Infinite, if people 
will but have it, and families are good-tem- 
pered. We trust we shall be read by hundreds 
of such this morning. Of some we are certain; 
and do hereby, agreeably to our ubiquitous 
privileges, take several breakfasts at once. 
How pleasant is this rug! How bright and 
generous the fire! How charming the fair 
makers of the tea ! And how happy that they 
have not to make it themselves, the drinkers 
of it ! Even the hackney-coachman means to 
get double as much as usual to-day, either by 
cheating or being pathetic : and the old gen- 
tleman is resolved to make amends for the 
necessity of his morning drive, by another 
pint of wine at dinner, and crumpets with his 
tea. It is not by grumbling against the ele- 
ments, that evil is to be done away ; but by 
keeping one's-self in good heart with one's 



fellow-creatures, and remembering that they 
are all capable of partaking our pleasures. 
The contemplation of pain, acting upon a 
splenetic temperament, produces a stirring 
reformer here and there, who does good rather 
out of spite against wrong, than sympathy 
with pleasure, and becomes a sort of disagree- 
able angel. Far be it from us, in the present 
state of society, to wish that no such existed ! 
But they will pardon us for labouring in the 
vocation, to which a livelier nature calls us, 
and drawing a distinction between the dis- 
satisfaction that ends in good, and the mere 
common-place grumbling that in a thousand 
instances to one ends in nothing but plaguing 
everybody as well as the grumbler. In almost 
all cases, those who are in a state of pain 
themselves, are in the fairest way for giving 
it; whereas, pleasure is in its nature social. 
The very abuses of it (terrible as they some- 
times are) cannot do as much harm as the 
violations of the common sense of good- 
humour; simply because it is its nature to go 
with, and not counter to humanity. The only 
point to take care of is, that as many innocent 
sources of pleasure are kept open as possible, 
and affection and imagination brought in to : 
show us what they are, and how surely all 
may partake of them. We are not likely to 
forget that a human being is of importance, 
when we can discern the merits of so small a 
thing as a leaf, or a honey-bee, or the beauty 
of a flake of snow, or the fanciful scenery 
made by the glowing coals in a fire-place. 
Professors of sciences may do this. Writers 
the most enthusiastic in a good cause, may 
sometimes lose sight of their duties, by reason 
of the very absorption in their enthusiasm. 
Imagination itself cannot always be abroad 
and at home at the same time. But the many 
are not likely to think too deeply of anything ; 
and the more pleasures that are taught them 
by dint of an agreeable exercise of their reflec- 
tion, the more they will learn to reflect on all 
round them, and to endeavour that their 
reflections may have a right to be agreeable. 
Any increase of the sum of our enjoyments 
almost invariably produces a wish to commu- 
nicate them. An over-indulged human being 
is ruined by being taught to think of nobody 
but himself ; but a human being, at once grati- 
fied and made to think of others, learns to add 
to his very pleasures in the act of diminishing 
them. 

But how, it may be said, are we to enjoy 
ourselves with reflection, when our very reflec- 
tion will teach us the quantity of suffering 
that exists ? How are we to be happy with 
breakfasting and warming our hands, when so 
many of our fellow-creatures are, at that 
instant, cold and hungry ? — It is no paradox 
to answer, that the fact of our remembering 
them, gives us a right to forget them: — we 
mean, that "there is a time for all things," 



G4 



THE COMPANION. 



and that having done our duty at other times 
in sympathising with pain, we have not only 
a right, but it becomes our duty, to show the 
happy privileges of virtue by sympathising 
with pleasure. The best person in a holiday- 
making party is bound to have the liveliest 
face ; or if not that, a face too happy even to 
be lively. Suppose, in order to complete the 
beauty of it, that the face is a lady's. She is 
bound, if any uneasy reflection crosses her 
mind, to say to herself, "To this happiness I 
have contributed; — pain I have helped to 
diminish; I am sincere, and wish well to 
everybody ; and I think everybody would be 
as good as I am, perhaps better, if society 
were wise. Now society, I trust, is getting 
wiser; perhaps will beat all our wisdom a 
hundred years hence : and meanwhile, I must 
not show that goodness is of no use, but let it 
realise all it can, and be as merry as the 
youngest." So saying, she gives her hand to 
a friend for a new dance, and really forgets 
what she has been thinking of, in the blithe 
spinning of her blood. A good-hearted woman, 
in the rosy beauty of her joy, is the loveliest 

object in . But everybody knows 

that. 

Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Senti- 
ments, has rebuked Thomson for his famous 
apostrophe in Winter to the "gay, licentious 
proud ;" where he says, that amidst their 
dances and festivities they little think of the 
misery that is going on in the world : — because, 
observes the philosopher, upon this principle 
there never could be any enjoyment in the 
world, unless every corner of it were happy ; 
which would be preposterous. "We need not 
say how entirely we agree with the philosopher 
in the abstract : and certainly the poet would 
deserve the rebuke, had he addressed himself 
only to the "gay;" but then his gay are also 
" licentious," and not only licentious but 
"proud." Now we confess we would not be 
too squeamish even about the thoughtlessness 
of these gentry, for is not their very thought- 
lessness their excuse ? And are they not 
brought up in it, just as a boy in St. Giles's is 
brought up in thievery, or a girl to callousness 
and prostitution ? It is not the thoughtless in 
high life from whom we are to expect any 
good, lecture them as we may : and observe — 
Thomson himself does not say how cruel they 
are ; or what a set of rascals to dance and be 
merry in spite of their better knowledge. He 



" Ah little think the gay, licentious proud " — 

and so they do. And so they will, till the 
diffusion of thought, among all classes, flows, 
of necessity, into their gay rooms and startled 
elevations ; and forces them to look out upon 
the world, that they may not be lost by being 
under the level. 

We had intended a very merry paper this 



week, to bespeak the favour of our new 
readers : — 

" A very merry, dancing, drinking, 

Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking " paper, — 

as Dryden has it. But the Christmas holidays 
are past ; and it is their termination, we sup- 
pose, that has made us serious. Sitting up at 
night also is a great inducer of your moral 
remark ; and if we are not so pleasant as we 
intended to be, it is because some friends of 
ours, the other night, were the pleasantest 
people in the world till five in the morning. 



III.- 



-FINE DAYS IN JANUARY AND 
FEBRUARY. 



We speak of those days, unexpected, sun- 
shiny, cheerful, even vernal, which come to- 
wards the end of January, and are too apt to 
come alone. They are often set in the midst of a 
series of rainy ones, like a patch of blue in the 
sky. Fine weather is much at any time, after 
or before the end of the year ; but, in the 
latter case, the days are still winter days; 
whereas, in the former, the year being turned, 
and March and April before us, we seem to 
feel the coming of spring. In the streets and 
squares, the ladies are abroad, with their 
colours and glowing cheeks. If you can hear 
anything but noise, you hear the sparrows. 
People anticipate at breakfast the pleasure 
they shall have in " getting out." The solitary 
poplar in a corner looks green against the sky ; 
and the brick wall has a warmth in it. Then 
in the noisier streets, what a multitude and a 
new life! What horseback! What prome- 
nading ! What shopping, and giving good day ! 
Bonnets encounter bonnets : — all the Miss 
Williamses meet all the Miss Joneses; and 
everybody wonders, particularly at nothing. 
The shop-windows, putting forward their best, 
may be said to be in blossom. The yellow 
carriages flash in the sunshine; footmen re- 
joice in their white calves, not dabbed, as 
usual, with rain ; the gossips look out of their 
three-pair-of-stairs windows; other windows 
are thrown open ; fruiterers' shops look well, 
swelling with full baskets ; pavements are 
found to be dry; lap-dogs frisk under their 
asthmas ; and old gentlemen issue forth, peer- 
ing up at the region of the north-east. 

Then in the country, how emerald the green, 
how open-looking the prospect ! Honeysuckles 
(a name alone with a garden in it) are detected 
in blossom ; the hazel follows ; the snowdrop 
hangs its white perfection, exquisite with green ; 
we fancy the trees are already thicker ; voices 
of winter birds are taken for new ones ; and in 
February new ones come — the thrush, the 
chaffinch, and the wood-lark. Then rooks 
begin to pair; and the wagtail dances in the 
lane. As we write this article, the sun is on 



WALKS HOME BY NIGHT. 



C5 



our paper, and chanticleer (the same, we trust, 
that we heard the other day) seems to crow in 
a very different style, lord of the ascendant, 
and as willing to be with his wives abroad as 
at home. We think we see him, as in Chaucer's 
homestead : 

He looketh, as it were, a grim leoim ; 
And on his toes he roameth up and down ; 
Him deigneth not to set his foot to ground ; 
He clucketh when he hath a corn yfound, 
And to him runnen then his wives all. 

Will the reader have the rest of the picture, as 
Chaucer gave it? It is as bright and strong as 
the day itself, and as suited to it as a falcon to 
a knight's fist. Hear how the old poet throws 
forth his strenuous music ; as fine, considered 
as mere music and versification, as the descrip- 
tion is pleasant and noble. 

His comb was redder than the fine corall, 
Embattled as it were a castle wall ; 
His bill was black, and as the jet it shone ; 
Like azure was his legges and his tone ; 
His nailes whiter than the lilly flower, 
And like the burned gold was his colour. 

Hardly one pause like the other throughout, 
and yet all flowing and sweet. The pause on 
the third syllable in the last line but one, and 
that on the sixth in the last, together with the 
deep variety of vowels, make a beautiful con- 
cluding couplet; and indeed the whole is a 
study for versification. So little were those 
old poets unaware of their task, as some are 
apt to suppose them ; and so little have others 
dreamt, that they surpassed them in their own 
pretensions. The accent, it is to be observed, 
in those concluding words, as coral and colour, 
is to be thrown on the last syllable, as it is 
in Italian. Color, colore, and Chaucer's old 
Anglo-Gallican word, is a much nobler one 
than our modern one colour. We have in- 
jured many such words, by throwing back 
the accent. 

We should beg pardon for this digression, if 
it had not been part of our understood agree- 
ment with the reader to be as desultory as we 
please, and as befits Companions. Our very 
enjoyment of the day we are describing would 
not let us be otherwise. It is also an old fancy 
of ours to associate the ideas of Chaucer with 
that of any early and vigorous manifestation 
of light and pleasure. He is not only the 
" morning-star " of our poetry, as Denham 
called him, but the morning itself, and a good 
bit of the noon; and we could as soon help 
quoting him at the beginning of the year, as 
we could help wishing to hear the cry of prim- 
roses, and thinking of the sweet faces that buy 
them. 



PART II.] 



IV.— WALKS HOME BY NIGHT IN BAD 
WEATHER. WATCHMEN. 

The readers of these our lucubrations need 
not be informed that we keep no carriage. 
The consequence is, that being visitors of the 
theatre, and having some inconsiderate friends 
who grow pleasanter and pleasanter till one in 
the morning, we are great walkers home by 
night ; and this has made us great acquaint- 
ances of watchmen, moon-light, mud-light, and 
other accompaniments of that interesting hour. 
Luckily we are fond of a walk by night. It 
does not always do us good ; but that is not 
the fault of the hour, but our own, who ought 
to be stouter ; and therefore we extract what 
good we can out of our necessity, with becoming 
temper. It is a remarkable thing in nature, 
and one of the good-naturedest things we know 
of her, that the mere fact of looking about us, 
and being conscious of what is going on, is its 
own reward, if we do but notice it in good- 
humour. Nature is a great painter (and art 
and society are among her works), to whose 
minutest touches the mere fact of becoming 
alive is to enrich the stock of our enjoyments. 

We confess there are points liable to cavil 
in a walk home by night in February. Old 
umbrellas have their weak sides ; and the 
quantity of mud and rain may surmount the 
picturesque. Mistaking a soft piece of mud 
for hard, and so filling your shoe with it, 
especially at setting out, must be acknowledged 
to be " aggravating." But then you ought to 
have boots. There are sights, indeed, in the 
streets of London, which can be rendered 
pleasant by no philosophy ; things too grave 
to be talked about in our present paper ; but 
we must premise, that our walk leads us out of 
town, and through streets and suburbs of by no 
means the worst description. Even there we 
may be grieved if we will. The farther the 
walk into the country, the more tiresome we 
may choose to find it ; and when we take it 
purely to oblige others, we must allow, as in 
the case of a friend of ours, that generosity 
itself on two sick legs may find limits to the 
notion of virtue being its own reward, and 
reasonably " curse those comfortable people " 
who, by the lights in their windows, are getting 
into their warm beds, and saying to one another, 
" Bad thing to be out of doors to-night." 

Supposing, then, that we are in a reasonable 
state of health and comfort in other respects, 
we say that a walk home at night has its merits, 
if you choose to meet with them. The worst 
part of it is the setting out ; the closing of the 
door upon the kind faces that part with you. 
But their words and looks, on the other hand, 
may set you well off. We have known a word 
last us all the way home, and a look make a 
dream of it. To a lover for instance no walk 
can be bad. He sees but one face in the rain 
and darkness ; the same that he saw by the 



G6 



THE COMPANION. 



light in the warm room. This ever accompa- 
nies him, looking in his eyes ; and if the most 
pitiable and spoilt face in the world should 
come between them, startling him with the 
saddest mockery of love, he would treat it 
kindly for her sake. But this is a begging of 
the question. A lover does not walk. He is 
sensible neither to the pleasures nor pains of 
walking. He treads on air ; and in the thick 
of all that seems inclement, has an avenue of 
light and velvet spread for him, like a sovereign 
prince. 

To resume, then, like men of this world. 
The advantage of a late hour, is that everything 
is silent and the people fast in their beds. 
This gives the whole world a tranquil appear- 
ance. Inanimate objects are no calmer than 
passions and cares now seem to be, all laid 
asleep. The human being is motionless as the 
house or the tree ; sorrow is suspended ; and 
you endeavour to think that love only is awake. 
Let not readers of true delicacy be alarmed, for 
we mean to touch profanely upon nothing that 
ought to be sacred ; and as we are for thinking 
the best on these occasions, it is of the best 
love we think ; love of no heartless order, 
and such only as ought to be awake with the 
stars. 

As to cares and curtain-lectures, and such- 
like abuses of the tranquillity of night, we call 
to mind, for their sakes, all the sayings of the 
poets and others about " balmy sleep," and the 
soothing of hurt minds, and the weariness of 
sorrow, which drops into forgetfulness. The 
great majority are certainly "fast as a church" 
by the time we speak of ; and for the rest, we 
are among the workers who have been sleepless 
for their advantage ; so we take out our licence 
to forget them for the time being. The only 
thing that shall remind us of them is the red 
lamp, shining afar over the apothecary's door ; 
which, while it does so, reminds us also that 
there is help for them to be had. I see him 
now, the pale blinker suppressing the conscious 
injustice of his anger at being roused by the 
apprentice, and fumbling himself out of the 
house, in hoarseness and great-coat, resolved to 
make the sweetness of the Christmas bill in- 
demnify him for the bitterness of the moment. 

But we shall be getting too much into the 
interior of the houses. By this time the hack- 
ney-coaches have all left the stands — a good 
symptom of their having got their day's money. 
Crickets are heard, here and there, amidst the 
embers of some kitchen. A dog follows us. 
Will nothing make him "go along?" We 
dodge him in vain ; we run ; we stand and 
" hish ! " at him, accompanying the prohibition 
with dehortatory gestures, and an imaginary 
picking up of a stone. We turn again, and 
there he is vexing our skirts. He even forces 
us into an angry doubt whether he will not 
starve, if we do not let him go home with us. 
Now if we could but lame him without being- 



cruel ; or if we were only an overseer, or a 
beadle, or a dealer in dog-skin ; or a political 
economist, to think dogs unnecessary. Oh ! 
come, he has turned a corner, he is gone ; we 
think we see him trotting off at a distance, thin 
and muddy ; and our heart misgives us. But 
it was not our fault ; we were not " hishing " 
at the time. His departure was lucky, for he 
had got our enjoyments into a dilemma ; our 
" article " would not have known what to do 
with him. These are the perplexities to which 
your sympathizers are liable. We resume our 
way, independent and alone ; for we have no 
companion this time, except our never-to-be- 
forgotten and ethereal companion, the reader. 
A real arm within another's puts us out of the 
pale of walking that is to be made good. It 
is good already. A fellow-pedestrian is com- 
pany ; is the party you have left ; you talk and 
laugh, and there is no longer anything to be 
contended with. But alone, and in bad weather, 
and with a long way to go, here is something 
for the temper and spirits to grapple with and 
turn to account ; and accordingly we are booted 
and buttoned up, an umbrella over our heads, 
the rain pelting upon it, and the lamp-light 
shining in the gutters ; " mud-shine," as an 
artist of our acquaintance used to call it, with 
a gusto of reprobation. Now, walk cannot 
well be worse ; and yet it shall be nothing if 
you meet it heartily. There is a pleasure in 
overcoming obstacles; mere action is some- 
thing ; imagination is more ; and the spinning 
of the blood, and vivacity of the mental endea- 
vour, act well upon one another, and gradually 
put you in a state of robust consciousness and 
triumph. Every time you set down your leg, 
you have a respect for it. The umbrella is 
held in the hand like a roaring trophy. 

We are now reaching the country : the fog 
and rain are over ; and we meet our old friends 
the watchmen, staid, heavy, indifferent, more 
coat than man, pondering, yet not pondering, 
old but not reverend, immensely useless. No ; 
useless they are not ; for the inmates of the 
houses think them otherwise, and in that ima- 
gination they do good. We do not pity the 
watchmen as we used. Old age often cares 
little for regular sleep. They could not be 
sleeping perhaps if they were in their beds ; 
and certainly they would not be earning. 
What sleep they get is perhaps sweeter in the 
watch-box, — a forbidden sweet ; and they have 
a sense of importance, and a claim on the 
persons in-doors, which, together with the am- 
plitude of their coating, and the possession of 
the box itself, make them feel themselves, not 
without reason, to be " somebody." They are 
peculiar and official. Tomkins is a cobbler as 
well as they ; but then he is no watchman. 
He cannot speak to "things of night;" nor 
bid " any man stand in the king's name." He 
does not get fees and gratitude from the old, 
the infirm, and the drunken ; nor " let gentle- 



SECRET OF SOME EXISTING FASHIONS. 



07 



men go ;* nor is he " a parish-man." The 
churchwardens don't speak to him. If he put 
himself ever so much in the way of " the great 
plumber," he would not say, " How do you 
find yourself, Tomkins ? " — " An ancient and 
quiet watchman." Such he was in the time of 
Shakspeare, and such he is now. Ancient, 
because he cannot help it ; and quiet, because 
he will not help it, if possible ; his object being 
to procure quiet on all sides, his own included. 
For this reason he does not make too much 
noise in crying the hour, nor is offensively 
particular in his articulation. No man shall 
sleep the worse for him, out of a horrid sense 
of the word " three." The sound shall be 
three, four, or one, as suits their mutual con- 
venience. 

Yet characters are to be found even among 
watehmen. They are not all mere coat, and 
lump, and indifference. By the way, what do 
they think of in general ? How do they vary 
the monotony of their ruminations from one to 
two, and from two to three, and so on ? Are 
they comparing themselves with the unofficial 
cobbler ; thinking of what they shall have for 
dinner to-morrow ; or what they were about 
six years ago ; or that their lot is the hardest 
in the world, as insipid old people are apt to 
think, for the pleasure of grumbling ; or that 
it has some advantages nevertheless, besides 
fees ; and that if they are not in bed, their 
wife is ? 

Of characters, or rather varieties among 
watchmen, we remember several. One was a 
Dandy Watchman, who used to ply at the top 
of Oxford-street, next the park. We called 
him the dandy, on account of his utterance. 
He had a mincing way with it, pronouncing the 
a in the word " past " as it is in hat, making a 
little preparatory hem before he spoke, and 
then bringing out his " past ten " in a style of 
genteel indifference ; as if, upon the w r hole, he 
was of that opinion. 

Another was the Metallic Watchman, who 
paced the same street towards Hanover-square, 
and had a clang in his voice like a trumpet. 
He was a voice and nothing else ; but any dif- 
ference is something in a watchman. 

A third who cried the hour in Bedford- 
square, was remarkable in his calling for being 
abrupt and loud. There was a fashion among 
his tribe just come up at that time, of omitting 
the words " past " and " o'clock," and crying 
only the number of the hour. I know not 
whether a recollection I have of his perform- 
ance one night is entire matter of fact, or 
whether any subsequent fancies of what might 
have taken place are mixed up with it ; but 
my impression is, that as I was turning the 
corner into the square with a friend, and was 
in the midst of a discussion in which numbers 
were concerned, we were suddenly startled, 
as if in solution of it, by a brief and tremen- 
dous outcry of — One. This paragraph ought 



to have been at the bottom of the page, 
and the word printed abruptly round the 
corner. 

A fourth watchman was a very singular 
phenomenon, a Beading Watchman. He had a 
book, which he read by the light of his lantern ; 
and instead of a pleasant, gave you a very un- 
comfortable idea of him. It seemed cruel to 
pitch amidst so many discomforts and priva- 
tions one who had imagination enough to wish 
to be relieved from them. Nothing but a 
sluggish vacuity befits a watchman. 

But the oddest of all was the Sliding Watch- 
man. Think of walking up a street in the 
depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the 
gutters, and sleet over head, and then figure to 
yourself a sort of bale of a man in white 
coming sliding towards you with a lantern in 
one hand, and an umbrella over his head. It 
was the oddest mixture of luxury and hard- 
ship, of juvenility and old age ! But this looked 
agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything 
before them ; and our invincible friend seemed 
a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at 
and butted by him like a goat. The slide 
seemed to bear him half through the night at 
once; he slipped from out of his box and his 
common-places at one rush cf a merry thought, 
and seemed to say, " Everything's in ima- 
gination ; — here goes the whole weight of my 
office." 

But we approach our home. How still the 
trees ! How deliriously asleep the country ! 
How beautifully grim and nocturnal this wooded 
avenue of ascent, against the cold white sky ! 
The watchmen and patroles, which the careful 
citizens have planted in abundance within a 
mile of their doors, salute us with their " good 
mornings ;" — not so welcome as we pretend ; 
for we ought not to be out so late ; and it is 
one of the assumptions of these fatherly old 
fellows to remind us of it. Some fowls, who 
have made a strange roost in a tree, flutter as 
we pass them ; — another pull up the hill, un- 
yielding ; a few strides on a level ; and there is 
the light in the window, the eye of the warm 
soul of the house, — one's home. How par- 
ticular, and yet how universal, is that word ; 
and how surely does it deposit every one for 
himself in his own nest ! 



V.— SECRET OF SOME EXISTING 
FASHIONS. 

Fashions have a short life or a long one, 
according as it suits the makers to startle us 
with a variety, or save themselves observation 
of a defect. Hence fashions set by young or 
handsome people are fugitive, and such are, 
for the most part, those that bring custom to 
the milliner. If we keep watch on an older 
one, we shall generally trace it, unless of general 
convenience, to some pertinacity on the part of 



ua 



THE COMPANION. 



the aged. Even fashions, otherwise convenient, 
as the trousers that have so long taken place 
of smallclothes, often perhaps owe their con- 
tinuance to some general defect, which they 
help to screen. The old are glad to retain 
them, and so be confounded with the young ; 
and among the latter, there are more limbs 
perhaps to which loose clothing is acceptable, 
than tight. More legs and knees, we suspect, 
rejoice in those cloaks, than would be proud to 
acknowledge themselves in a shoe and stocking. 
The pertinacity of certain male fashions during 
the last twenty years, we think we can trace 
to a particular source. If it be objected, that 
the French partook of them, and that our 
modes have generally come from that country, 
we suspect that the old court in France had 
more to do with them, than Napoleon's, which 
was confessedly masculine and military. The 
old French in this country, and the old noblesse 
in the other, wore bibs and trousers, when the 
Emperor went in a plain stock and delighted 
to show his good leg. For this period, if for 
this only, we are of opinion, that whether the 
male fashions did or did not originate in France, 
other circumstances have conspired to retain 
them in both countries, for which the revolu- 
tionary government cannot account. Mr. 
Hazlitt informs us in his Life of Napoleon, that 
during the consulate, all the courtiers were 
watching the head of the state to know whether 
mankind were to wear their own hair or powder ; 
and that Bonaparte luckily settled the matter, 
by deciding in favour of nature and cleanliness. 
But here the revolutionary authority stopped ; 
nor in this instance did it begin : for it is un- 
derstood, that it was the plain head of Dr. 
Franklin, when he was ambassador at Paris, 
that first amused, and afterwards interested, 
the giddy polls of his new acquaintances ; who 
went and did likewise. Luckily, this was a 
fashion that suited all ages, and on that account 
it has survived. But the bibs, and the trousers, 
and the huge neckcloths, whence come they ? 
How is it, at least, that they have been so long 
retained ? Observe that polished old gentleman, 
who bows so well,* and is conversing with the 
most agreeable of physicians, f He made a 
great impression in his youth, and was naturally 
loath to give it up. On a sudden he finds his 
throat not so juvenile as he could wish it. Up 
goes his stock, and enlarges. He rests both 
his cheeks upon it, the chin settling comfortably 
upon a bend in the middle, as becomes its 
delicacy. By and bye, he thinks the cheeks 
themselves do not present as good an aspect 
as with so young a heart might in reason be 
expected ; and forth issue the points of his shirt- 
eollar, and give them an investment at once 
cherishing and spirited. Thirdly, he suspects 
his waist to have played him a trick of good 
living, and surpassed the bounds of youth and 
elegance before he was well aware of it. 



Therefore, to keep it seemingly, if not actually 
within limits, forth he sends a frill in the first 
instance, and a padded set of lapels afterwards. 
He happens to look on the hand that does all 
this, and discerns with a sigh that it is not 
quite the same hand to look at, which the 
women have been transported to kiss ; though 
for that matter they will kiss it still, and be 
transported too. The wrist-band looks forth, 
and says, " Shall I help to cover it ?" and it is 
allowed to do so, being a gentlemanly finish, 
and impossible to the mechanical. But finally 
the legs : they were amongst the handsomest 
in the world ; and how did they not dance ! 
What conquests did they not achieve in the 
time of hoop-petticoats and toupees ! And 
long afterwards, were not Apollo and Hercules 
found in them together, to the delight of the 
dowagers ? And shall the gods be treated with 
disrespect, when the heaviness of change comes 
upon them ? No. Round comes the kindly 
trouserian veil (as Dyer of" The Fleece" would 
have had it) ; the legs retreat, like other con- 
querors, into retirement ; and only the lustre 
of their glory remains, such as Bonaparte 
might have envied. 



* The late King. 



t Sir William K. 



VI.— RAIN OUT OF A CLEAR SKY. 

In a work, De Varia Historia, written after 
the manner of ^Elian, by Leonico Tomeo, an 
elegant scholar of the fifteenth century, we meet 
with the following pretty story : — When Pha- 
lantus led his colony out of Sparta into the 
south of Italy, he consulted the oracle of Apollo, 
and was informed that he should know the 
region he was to inhabit, by the fall of a plen- 
tiful shower out of a clear sky. Full of doubt 
and anxiety at this answer, and unable to meet 
with any one who could interpret it for him, 
he took his departure, arrived in Italy, but 
could succeed in occupying no region, — in 
capturing no city. This made him fall to con- 
sidering the oracle more particularly ; upon 
which he came to the conclusion, that he had 
undertaken a foolish project, and that the gods 
meant to tell him so ; for that a sky should be 
clear, and yet the rain out of it plentiful, now 
seemed to him a manifest impossibility. 

Tired out with the anxious thoughts arising 
from this conclusion, he laid his head on the 
lap of his wife, who had come with him, and 
took such a draught of sleep as the fatigue of 
sorrow is indulged with, like other toil. His 
wife loved him ; and as he lay thus tenderly in 
her lap, she kept looking upon his face ; till 
thinking of the disappointments he had met 
with, and the perils he had still to undergo, she 
began to weep bitterly, so that the tears fell 
plentifully upon him, and awoke him. He 
looked up, and seeing those showers out of her 
eyes, hailed at last the oracle with joy, for his 
wife's name was iEthra, which signifies "a 



THE MOUNTAIN OF THE TWO LOVERS. 



09 



clear sky ;" and thus he knew that he had 
arrived at the region where he was to settle. 
The next night he took Tarentum, which was 
the greatest city in those parts ; and he and his 
posterity reigned in that quarter of Italy, as 
you may see in Virgil. 



VII.— THE MOUNTAIN OF THE TWO 
LOVERS. 

We forget in what hook it was, many years 
ago, that we read the story of a lover who was 
to win his mistress hy carrying her to the top 
of a mountain, and how he did win her, and 
how they ended their days on the same spot. 

We think the scene was in Switzerland ; but 
the mountain, though high enough to tax his 
stout/ heart to the uttermost, must have been 
among the lowest. Let us fancy it a good lofty 
hill in the summer-time. It was, at any rate, 
so high, that the father of the lady, a proud 
noble, thought it impossible for a young man 
so burdened to scale it. For this reason alone, 
in scorn, he bade him do it, and his daughter 
should be his. 

The peasantry assembled in the valley to 
witness so extraordinary a sight. They mea- 
sured the mountain with their eyes ; they 
communed with one another, and shook their 
heads ; but all admired the young man ; and 
some of his fellows, looking at their mistresses, 
thought they could do as much. The father 
was on horseback, apart and sullen, repenting 
that he had subjected his daughter even to the 
show of such a hazard ; but he thought it 
would teach his inferiors a lesson. The young 
man (the son of a small land-proprietor, who 
had some pretensions to wealth, though none 
to nobility) stood, respectful-looking, but con- 
fident, rejoicing in his heart that he should 
win his mistress, though at the cost of a noble 
pain, which he could hardly think of as a pain, 
considering who it was that he was to carry. 
If he died for it, he should at least have had 
her in his arms, and have looked her in the 
face. To clasp her person in that manner 
was a pleasure which he contemplated with 
such transport as is known only to real lovers ; 
for none others know how respect heightens 
the joy of dispensing with formality, and how 
the dispensing with the formality ennobles 
and makes grateful the respect. 

The lady stood by the side of her father, 
pale, desirous, and dreading. She thought her 
lover would succeed, but only because she 
thought him in every respect the noblest of 
his sex, and that nothing was too much for his 
strength and valour. Great fears came over 
her nevertheless. She knew not what might 
happen, in the chances common to all. She 
felt the bitterness of being herself the burden 
to him and the task ; and dared neither to 
look at her father nor the mountain. She 



fixed her eyes, now on the crowd (which 
nevertheless she beheld not) and now on her 
hand and her fingers' ends, which she doubled 
up towards her with a pretty pretence, — the 
only deception she had ever used. Once or 
twice a daughter or a mother slipped out of 
the crowd, and coming up to her, notwithstand- 
ing their fears of the lord baron, kissed that 
hand which she knew not what to do with. 

The father said, " Now, sir, to put an end to 
this mummery ; " and the lover, turning pale 
for the first time, took up the lady. 

The spectators rejoice to see the manner in 
which he moves off, slow but secure, and as if 
encouraging his mistress. They mount the 
hill ; they proceed well ; he halts an instant 
before he gets midway, and seems refusing 
something ; then ascends at a quicker rate ; 
and now being at the midway point, shifts the 
lady from one side to the other. The specta- 
tors give a great shout. The baron, with an. 
air of indifference, bites the tip of his gauntlet, 
and then casts on them an eye of rebuke, At 
the shout the lover resumes his way. Slow 
but not feeble is his step, yet it gets slower. 
He stops again, and they think they see the 
lady kiss him on the forehead. The women 
begin to tremble, but the men say he will be 
victorious. He resumes again ; he is half-way 
between the middle and the top ; he rushes, 
he stops, he staggers ; but he does not fall. 
Another shout from the men, and he resumes 
once more ; two-thirds of the remaining part 
of the way are conquered. They are certain 
the lady kisses him on the forehead and on 
the eyes. The women burst into tears, and 
the stoutest men look pale. He ascends slow- 
lier than ever, but seeming to be more sure. 
He halts, but it is only to plant his foot to go 
on again ; and thus he picks his way, planting 
his foot at every step, and then gaining ground 
with an effort. The lady lifts up her arms, as 
if to lighten him. See ! he is almost at the 
top ; he stops, he struggles, he moves side- 
ways, taking very little steps, and bringing 
one foot every time close to the other. Now 
— he is all but on the top ; he halts again ; he 
is fixed ; he staggers. A groan goes through 
the multitude. Suddenly, he turns full front 
towards the top ; it is luckily almost a level ; 
he staggers, but it is forward : — Yes : — every 
limb in the multitude makes a movement as if 
it would assist him : — see at last ! he is on the 
top ; and down he falls flat with his burden. 
An enormous shout ! He has won : he has 
won. Now he has a right to caress his mis- 
tress, and she is caressing him, for neither of 
them gets up. If he has fainted, it is with joy, 
and it is in her arms. 

The baron put spurs to his horse, the crowd 
following him. Half-way he is obliged to dis- 
mount ; they ascend the rest of the hill toge- 
ther, the crowd silent and happy, the baron 
ready to burst with shame aad impatience. 



70 



THE COMPANION. 



They reach the top. The lovers are face to 
face on the ground, the lady clasping him with 
both arms, his lying on each side. 

"Traitor!" exclaimed the baron, "thou hast 
practised this feat before, on purpose to deceive 
me. Arise ! " " You cannot expect it, sir,' 
said a worthy man, who was rich enough to 
speak his mind : " Samson himself might take 
his rest after such a deed ! " 

"Part them ! " said the baron. 

Several persons went up, not to part them, 
but to congratulate and keep them together. 
These people look close ; they kneel down ; 
they bend an ear ; they bury their faces upon 
them. " God forbid they should ever be parted 
more," said a venerable man ; " they never can 
be." He turned his old face streaming with 
tears, and looked up at the baron : — " Sir, they 
are dead ! " 



VIII.-THE TRUE STORY OF VERTUMNUS 
AND POMONA. 

Weak and uninitiated are they who talk of 
things modern as opposed to the idea of anti- 
quity ; who fancy that the Assyrian monarchy 
must have preceded tea-drinking ; and that no 
Sims or Gregson walked in a round hat and 
trousers before the times of Inachus. Plato 
has informed us (and therefore everybody 
ought to know) that at stated periods of time, 
everything which has taken place on earth is 
acted over again. There have been a thousand 
or a million reigns, for instance, of Charles the 
Second, and there will be an infinite number 
more : the tooth-ache we had in the year 1811, 
is making ready for us some thousands of years 
hence ; again shall people be wise and in love 
as surely as the May-blossoms re-appear ; and 
again will Alexander make a fool of himself at 
Babylon, and Bonaparte in Russia. 

Among the heaps of modern stories, which 
are accounted ancient, and which have been 
deprived of their true appearance, by the alter- 
ation of colouring and costume, there is none 
more decidedly belonging to modern times 
than that of Vertumnus and Pomona. Ver- 
tumnus was, and will be, a young fellow, re- 
markable for his accomplishments, in the 
several successive reigns of Charles the Second ; 
and, I find, practised his story over in the 
autumn of the year 1 680. He was the younger 
brother of a respectable family in Hereford- 
shire ; and from his genius at turning himself 
to a variety of shapes, came to be called, in 
after-ages, by his classical name. In like 
manner, Pomona, the heroine of the story, 
being the goddess of those parts, and singularly 
fond of their scenery and productions, the 
Latin poets, in after-ages, transformed her ad- 
ventures according to their fashion, making 
her a goddess of mythology, and giving her a 
name after her beloved fruits. Her real name 



was Miss Appleton. I shall therefore waive 
that matter once for all ; and retaining only 
the appellation which poetry has rendered so 
pleasant, proceed with the true story. 

Pomona was a beauty like her name, all 
fruit and bloom. She was a ruddy brunette, 
luxuriant without grossness ; and had a spring 
in her step, like apples dancing on a bough. 
(I 'd put all this into verse, to which it has a 
natural tendency ; but I haven't time.) It was 
no poetical figure to say of her, that her lips 
were cherries, and her cheeks a peach. Her 
locks, in clusters about her face, trembled 
heavily as she walked. The colour called 
Pomona-green was named after her favourite 
dress. Sometimes in her clothes she imitated 
one kind of fruit and sometimes another, philo- 
sophising in a pretty poetical manner on the 
common nature of things, and saying there was 
more in the similes of her lovers than they 
suspected. Her dress now resembled a burst 
of white blossoms, and now of red ; but her 
favourite one was green, both coat and boddice, 
from which her beautiful face looked forth 
like a bud. To see her tending her trees in 
her orchard, (for she would work herself, and 
sing all the while like a milk-maid) — to see her 
I say tending the fruit-trees, never caring for 
letting her boddice slip a little off her shoulders, 
and turning away now and then to look up at 
a bird, when her lips would glance in the sun- 
shine like cherries bedewed, — such a sight, you 
may imagine, was not to be had every where. 
The young clowns would get up in the trees 
for a glimpse of her, over the garden-wall ; and 
swear she was like an angel in Paradise. 

Everybody was in love with her. The squire 
was in love with her ; the attorney was in love ; 
the parson was particularly in love. The 
peasantry in their smock-frocks, old and young, 
were all in love. You never saw such a loving 
place in your life ; yet somehow or other the 
women were not jealous, nor fared the worse. 
The people only seemed to have grown the 
kinder. Their hearts overflowed to all about 
them. Such toasts at the great house ! The 
Squire's name was Payne, which afterwards 
came to be called Pan. Pan, Payne (Paynim), 
Pagan, a villager. The race was so numerous, 
that country -gentlemen obtained the name of 
Paynim in general, as distinguished from the 
nobility ; a circumstance which has not es- 
caped the learning of Milton : 

•' Both Paynim and the Peers." 

Silenus was Cy or Cymon Lenox, the host of 
the Tun, a fat merry old fellow, renowned in 
the song as Old Sir Cymon the King. He was 
in love too. All the Satyrs, or rude wits of 
the neighbourhood, and all the Fauns, or softer- 
spoken fellows, — none of them escaped. There 
was also a Quaker gentleman, I forget his 
name, who made himself conspicuous. Po- 
mona confessed to herself that he had merit; 



STORY OF VERTUMNUS AND POMONA. 



71 



but it was so unaccompanied with anything of 
the ornamental or intellectual, that she could 
not put up with him. Indeed, though she was 
of a loving nature, and had every other reason 
to wish herself settled (for she was an heiress 
and an orphan), she could not find it in her 
heart to respond to any of the rude multitude 
around her ; which at last occasioned such im- 
patience in them, and uneasiness to herself, 
that she was fain to keep close at home, and 
avoid the lanes and country assemblies, for fear 
of being carried off. It was then that the 
clowns used to mount the trees outside her 
garden- wall to get a sight of her. 

Pomona wrote to a cousin she had in town, of 
the name of Cerintha. — " Oh, my dear Cerintha, 
what am I to do ! I could laugh while I say 
it, though the tears positively come into my 
eyes ; but it is a sad thing to be an heiress 
with ten thousand a-year, and one's guardian 
just dead. Nobody will let me alone. And 
the worst of it is, that while the rich animals 
that pester me, disgust one with talking about 
their rent-tolls, the younger brothers force me 
to be suspicious of their views upon mine. I 
could throw all my money into the Wye for 
vexation. God knows I do not care twopence 
for it. Oh Cerintha ! I wish you were un- 
married, and could change yourself into a man, 
and come and deliver me ; for you are disin- 
terested and sincere, and that is all I require. 
At all events, I will run for it, and be with you 
before winter ; for here I cannot stay. Your 
friend the Quaker has just rode by. He says, 
' verily,' that I am cold ! I say verily he is no 
wiser than his horse ; and that I could pitch 
him after my money." 

Cerintha sympathised heartily with her cousin, 
but she was perplexed to know what to do. 
There were plenty of wits and young fellows 
of her acquaintance, both rich and poor ; but 
only one whom she thought fit for her charm- 
ing cousin, and he was. a younger brother as 
poor as a rat. Besides, he was not only liable 
to suspicion on that account, but full of deli- 
cacies of his own, and the last man in the world 
to hazard a generous woman's dislike. This 
was no other than our friend Vertumnus. His 
real name was Vernon. He lived about five 
miles from Pomona, and was almost the only 
young fellow of any vivacity who had not 
been curious enough to get a sight of her. He 
had got a notion that she was proud. " She 
may be handsome," thought he ; " but a hand- 
some proud face is but a handsome ugly one 
to my thinking, and I'll not venture my poverty 
to her ill-humour." Cerintha had half made 
up her mind to undeceive him through the 
medium of his sister, who was an acquaintance 
of hers ; but an accident did it for her. Ver- 
tumnus was riding one day with some friends, 
who had been rejected, when passing by Po- 
mona's orchard, he saw one of her clownish 
admirers up in the trees, peeping at her over 



the wall. The gaping unsophisticated admira- 
tion of the lad made them stop. " Devil take 
me," said one of our hero's companions, "if 
they are not at it still. Why, you booby, did 
yon never see a proud woman before, that you 
stand gaping there, as if your soul had gone 
out of ye ? " " Proud," said the lad, looking 
down : — " a woudn't say nay to a fly, if gentle- 
folks wouldn't tease 'un so." "Come," said 
our hero, " I'll take this opportunity, and see 
for myself." He was up in the tree in an in- 
stant, and almost as speedily exclaimed, " God! 
what a face ! " 

" He has it, by the Lord ! " cried the others, 
laughing : — " fairly struck through the ribs, 
by Jove. Look, if looby and he arn't sworn 
friends on the thought of it." 

It looked very like it certainly. Our hero 
had scarcely gazed at her, when without turning 
away his eyes, he clapped his hand upon that 
of the peasant with a hearty shake, and said, 
" You're right, my friend. If there is pride in 
that face, truth itself is a lie. What a face ! 
What eyes ! What a figure ! " 

Pomona was observing her old gardener fill 
a basket. From time to time he looked up at 
her, smiling and talking. She was eating a 
plum ; and as she said something that made 
them laugh, her rosy mouth sparkled with all 
its pearls in the sun. 

" Pride ! " thought Vertumnus : — " there's 
no more pride in that charming mouth, than 
there is folly enough to relish my fine com- 
panions here." 

Our hero returned home more thoughtful 
than he came, replying but at intervals to 
the raillery of those with him, and then giv- 
ing them pretty savage cuts. He was more 
out of humour with his poverty than he had 
ever felt, and not at all satisfied with the ac- 
complishments which might have emboldened 
him to forget it. However, in spite of his de- 
licacies, he felt it would be impossible not to 
hazard rejection like the rest. He only made 
up his mind to set about paying his addresses 
in a different manner ; — though how it was to 
be done he could not very well see. His first 
impulse was to go to her and state the plain 
case at once; to say how charming she was, and 
how poor her lover, and that nevertheless he 
did not care two-pence for her riches, if she 
would but believe him. The only delight of 
riches would be to share them with her. " But 
then," said he, " how is she to take my word 
for that ? " 

On arriving at home he found his sister pre- 
pared to tell him what he had found out for 
himself, — that Pomona was not proud. Un- 
fortunately she added, that the beautiful 
heiress had acquired a horror of younger bro- 
thers. " Ay," thought he, " there it is. I 
shall not get her, precisely because I have at 
once the greatest need of her money and the 
greatest contempt for it. Alas, yet not so ! 1 



72 



THE COMPANION. 



have not contempt for anything that belongs to 
her, even her money. How heartily could I ac- 
cept it from her, if she knew me, and if she is as 
generous as I take her to be ! How delightful 
would it be to plant, to build, to indulge a 
thousand expenses in her company ! those 
rascals of rich men, without sense or taste, that 
are now going about, spending their money as 
they please, and buying my jewels and my cabi- 
nets, that I ought to be making her presents 
of. I could tear my hair to think of it." 

It happened, luckily or unluckily for our 
hero, that he was the best amateur actor that 
had ever appeared. Betterton could not per- 
form Hamlet better, nor Lacy a friar. 

He disguised himself, and contrived to get 
hired in his lady's household as a footman. It 
was a difficult matter, all the other servants 
having been there since she was a child, and 
just grown old enough to escape the passion 
common to all who saw her. They loved her like 
a daughter of their own, and were indignant at 
the trouble her lovers gave her. Vertumnus, 
however, made out his case so well, that they 
admitted him. For a time all went on smoothly. 
Yes : fur three or four weeks he performed 
admirably, confining himself to the real foot- 
man. Nothing could exceed the air of indif- 
ferent zeal with which he waited at table. He 
was respectful, he was attentive, even officious; 
but still as to a footman's mistress, not as to a 
lover's. He looked in her face, as if he did not 
wish to kiss her; said " Yes, ma'am " and " No, 
ma'am," like any other servant ; and consented, 
not without many pangs to his vanity, to wear 
proper footman's clothes : namely, such as did 
not fit him. He even contrived, by a violent 
effort, to suppress all appearance of emotion, 
when he doubled up the steps of her chariot, after 
seeing the finest foot and ancle in the world. In 
his haste to subdue this emotion, he was one 
day nigh betraying himself. He forgot his part 
so far, as to clap the door to with more vehemence 
than usual. His mistress started, and gave a 
cry. He thought he had shut her hand in, and 
opening the door again with more vehemence, 
and as pale as death, exclaimed, tl God of Hea- 
ven ! What have I done to her ! " 

" Nothing, James," — said his mistress, smil- 
ing ; " only another time you need not be in 
quite such a hurry." She was surprised at the 
turn of his words, and at a certain air which 
she observed for the first time ; but the same 
experience which might have enabled her to 
detect him, led her, by a reasonable vanity, to 
think that love had exalted her footman's 
manners. This made her observe him with 
some interest afterwards, and notice how good- 
looking he was, and that his shape was better 
than his clothes : but he continued to act his 
part so well, that she suspected nothing further. 
She only resolved, if he gave any more evi- 
dences of being in love, to despatch him after 
his betters. 



By degrees, our hero's nature became too 
much for his art. He behaved so well among 
his fellow-servants, that they all took a liking 
to him. Now, when we please others, and they 
show it, we wish to please them more : and it 
turned out that James could play on the wol di 
gamba. He played so well, that his mistress 
must needs inquire " what musician they had 
in the house." " James, madam." — A week or 
two aften somebody was reading a play, and 
making tnem all die with laughter. — " Who is 
that reading so well there, and making you all 
a parcel of madcaps ? " — " It's only James, 
madam." — " I have a prodigious footman ! " 
thought Pomona. Another day, my lady's- 
maid came up all in tears to do something for 
her mistress, and could scarcely speak. " What's 
the matter, Lucy ? " " Oh James, madam ! " 
Her lady blushed a little, and was going to be 
angry. 

" I hope he has not been uncivil." 

" Oh no, ma'am : only I could not bear his 
being turned out o' doors ! " 

" Turned out of doors !" 

" Yes, ma'am ; and their being so cruel as to 
singe his white head." 

" Singe his white head ! Surely the girl's 
head is turned. What is it, poor soul ! " 

" Oh, nothing, ma'am. Only the old king in 
the play, as your ladyship knows. They turn 
him out o'doors, and singe his white head ; 
and Mr. James did it so natural like, that he 
has made us all of a drown of tears. T'other 
day he called me his Ophelia, and was so angry 
with me I could have died." — " This man is no 
footman," said the lady. She sent for him up 
stairs, and the butler with him. "Pray, sir, 
may I beg the favour of knowing who you 
are ? " The abruptness of this question totally 
confounded our hero. 

"For God's sake, madam, do not think it 
worth your while to be angry with me and I 
will tell you all." 

"Worth my while, sir! I know not what 
you mean by its being worth my while," cried 
our heroine, who really felt more angry than 
she wished to be: "but when an impostor 
comes into the house, it is natural to wish to 
be on one's guard against him." 

" Impostor, madam !" said he, reddening in 
his turn, and rising with an air of dignity. 
" It is true," he added, in an humbler tone, " I 
am not exactly what I seem to be ; but I am a 
younger brother of a good family, and — " 

" A younger brother ! " exclaimed Pomona, 
turning away with a look of despair. 

"Oh, those d — d words !" thought Vertum- 
nus ; " they have undone me. I must go ; and 
yet it is hard." 

" I go, madam," said he in a hurry : — 
"believe me in only this, that I shall give you 
no unbecoming disturbance ; and I must vindi- 
cate myself so far as to say, that I did not 
come into this house for what you suppose." 



STORY OF VERTUMNUS AND POMONA. 



73 



Then giving her a look of inexpressible tender- 
ness and respect, and retiring as he said it, 
with a low bow, he added, " May neither im- 
posture nor unhappiness ever come near you." 
Pomona could not help thinking of the 
strange footman she had had. " He did not 
come into the house for what I supposed." 
She did not know whether to be pleased or not 
at this phrase. What did he mean by it ? 
What did he think she supposed ? Upon the 
whole, she found her mind occupied with the 
man a little too much, and proceeded to busy 
herself with her orchard. 

There was now more caution observed in 
admitting new servants into the house ; yet a 
new gardener's assistant came, who behaved 
like a reasonable man for two months. He 
then passionately exclaimed one morning, as 
Pomona was rewarding him for some roses, 
u I cannot bear it ! " — and turned out to be our 
hero, who was obliged to decamp. My lady 
became more cautious than ever, and would 
speak to all the new servants herself. One day a 
very remarkable thing occurred. A whole side 
of the green-house was smashed to pieces. The 
glazier was sent for, not without suspicion of 
being the perpetrator ; and the man's way of 
behaving strengthened it, for he stood looking 
about him, and handling the glass to no pur- 
pose. His assistant did all the work, and yet 
somehow did not seem to get on with it. The 
truth was, the fellow was innocent and yet 
not so, for he had brought our hero with him 
as his journeyman. Pomona, watching narrow- 
ly, discovered the secret, but for reasons best 
known to herself, pretended otherwise, and 
the men were to come again next day. 

That same evening my lady's maid's cousin's 
husband's aunt came to see her, — a free, jolly, 
maternal old dame, who took the liberty of 
kissing the mistress of the house, and thank- 
ing her for all favours. Pomona had never 
received such a long kiss. "Excuse," cried 
the housewife, "an old body who has had 
daughters and grand-daughters, ay, and three 
husbands to boot, God rest their souls! but 
dinner always makes me bold — old, and bold, 
as we say in Gloucestershire — old and bold ; 
and her ladyship's sweet face is like an angel's 
in heaven." All this was said in a voice at 
once loud and trembling, as if the natural 
jollity of the old lady was counteracted by her 
years. 

Pomona felt a little confused at this liberty 
of speech ; but her good nature was always 
uppermost, and she respected the privileges of 
age. So with a blushing face, not well know- 
ing what to say, she mentioned something 
about the old lady's three husbands, and said 
she hardly knew whether to pity her most for 
losing so many friends, or to congratulate 
the gentlemen on so cheerful a companion. 
The old lady's breath seemed to be taken 
away by the elegance of this compliment, for 



she stood looking and saying not a word. At 
last she made signs of being a little deaf, and 
Betty repeated as well as she could what her 
mistress had said. " She is an angel, for cer- 
tain," cried the gossip, and kissed her again. 
Then perceiving that Pomona was prepared to 
avoid a repetition of this freedom, she said, 
" But, Lord ! why doesn't her sweet ladyship 
marry herself, and make somebody's life a 
heaven upon earth ? They tell me she's fright- 
ened at the cavaliers and the money-hunters, 
and all that ; but God-a-mercy, must there be 
no honest man that's poor ; and mayn't the 
dear sweet soul be the jewel of some one's eye, 
because she has money in her pocket ? " 

Pomona, who had entertained some such 
reflections as these herself, hardly knew what 
to answer ; but she laughed and made some 
pretty speech. 

"Ay, ay," resumed the old woman. "Well 
there's no knowing." (Here she heaved a great 
sigh.) " And so my lady is mighty curious 
in plants and apples, they tell me, and quite a 
gardener, Lord love her ! and rears me cart- 
loads of peaches. Why, her face is a peach, 
or I should like to know what is. But it didn't 
come of itself neither. No, no ; for that 
matter, there were peaches before it ; and Eve 
didn't live alone, I warrant me, or we should 
have had no peaches now, for all her garden- 
ing. Well, well, my sweet young lady, don't 
blush and be angry, for I am but a poor fool- 
ish, old body, you know, old enough to be your 
grandmother ; but I can't help thinking it a 
pity, that's the truth on't. Oh dear ! Well, 
gentlefolks will have their fegaries, but it was 
very different in my time, you know ; and 
Lord ! now to speak the plain scripter truth ; 
what would the world come to, and where 
would her sweet ladyship be herself, I should 
like to know, if her own mother, that's now an 
angel in heaven, had refused to keep company 
with her ladyship's father, because she brought 
him a good estate, and made him the happiest 
man on God's yearth !" 

The real love that existed between Pomona's 
father and mother being thus brought to her 
recollection, touched our heroine's feelings ; 
and looking at the old dame, with tears in her 
eyes, she begged her to stay and take some tea, 
and she would see her again before she went 
away. " Ay, and that I will, and a thousand 
thanks into the bargain from one who has been 
a mother herself, and can't help crying to see 
my lady in tears. I could kiss 'em off, if I 
warn't afraid of being troublesome ; and so 
God bless her, and I'll make bold to make her 
my curtsey again before I go." 

The old body seemed really affected, and 
left the room with more quietness than Pomona 
had looked for, Betty meanwhile showing an 
eagerness to get her away, which was a little 
remarkable. In less than half an hour, there 
was a knock at the parlour-door, and Pomona 



74 



THE COMPANION. 



saying, " Come in," the door was held again by- 
somebody for a few seconds, during which 
there was a loud and apparently angry whisper 
of voices. Our heroine, not without agitation, 
heard the words, " No, no !" and " Yes," re- 
peated with vehemence, and then, K I tell you 
I must and will ; she will forgive you, be 
assured, and me too, for she'll never see me 
again." And at these words the door was 
opened by a gallant-looking young man, who 
closed it behind him, and advancing with a 
low bow, spoke as follows : — 

" If you are alarmed, madam, which I confess 
you reasonably may be at this intrusion, I 
beseech you to be perfectly certain that you 
will never be so alarmed again, nor indeed ever 
again set eyes on me, if it so please you. You 
see before you, madam, that unfortunate younger 
brother (for I will not omit even that title to 
your suspicion), who, seized with an invincible 
passion as he one day beheld you from your 
garden wall, has since run the chance of your 
displeasure, by coming into the house under a 
variety of pretences, and inasmuch as he has 
violated the truth has deserved it. But one 
truth he has not violated, which is, that never 
man entertained a passion sincerer ; and God 
is my witness, madam, how foreign to my heart 
is that accursed love of money (I beg your 
pardon, but I confess it agitates me in my turn 
to speak of it), which other people's advances 
and your own modesty have naturally induced 
you to suspect in every person situated as I 
am. Forgive me, madam, for every alarm I 
have caused you, this last one above all. I 
could not deny to my love and my repentance 
the mingled bliss and torture of this moment ; 
but as I am really and passionately a lover of 
truth as well as of yourself, this is the last 
trouble I shall give you, unless you are pleased 
to admit what I confess I have very little hopes 
of, which is, a respectful pressure of my suit in 
future. Pardon me even these words, if they 
displease you. You have nothing to do but to 
bid me — leave you ; and when he quits this 
apartment, Harry Vernon troubles you no 
more." 

A silence ensued for the space of a few 
seconds. The gentleman was very pale ; so 
was the lady. At length she said, in a very 
under tone, " This surprise, sir — I was not 
insensible — I mean, I perceived — sure, sir, it is 
not Mr. Vernon, the brother of my cousin's 
friend, to whom I am speaking?" 

" The same, madam." 

" And why not at once, sir — I mean — that is 
to say — Forgive me, sir, if circumstances con- 
spire to agitate me a little, and to throw me in 
doubt what I ought to say. I wish to say what 
is becoming, and to retain your respect ;" and 
the lady trembled as she said it. 

" My respect, madam, was never profounder 
than it is at this moment, even though I dare 
begin to hope that you will not think it dis- 



respectful on my part to adore you. If I might 
but hope, that months or years of service — " 

" Be seated, sir, I beg ; I am very forgetful. 
I am an orphan, Mr. Vernon, and you must 
make allowances as a gentleman" (here her 
voice became a little louder) " for anything in 
which I may seem to forget, either what is due 
to you or to myself." 

The gentleman had not taken a chair, but at 
the end of this speech he approached the lady, 
and led her to her own seat with an air full of 
reverence. 

" Ah, madam," said he, * if you could but 
fancy you had known me these five years, you 
would at least give me credit for enough truth, 
and I hope enough tenderness and respectfulness 
of heart (for they all go together) to be certain 
of the feelings I entertain towards your sex in 
general ; much more towards one whose nature 
strikes me with such a gravity of admiration 
at this moment, that praise even falters on my 
tongue. Could I dare hope that you meant to 
say anything more kind to me than a common 
expression of good wishes, I would dare to 
say, that the sweet truth of your nature not 
only warrants your doing so, but makes it a 
part of its humanity." 

" Will you tell me, Mr. Vernon, what induced 
you to say so decidedly to my servant (for I 
heard it at the door) that you were sure I 
should never see you again." 

" Yes, madam, I will ; and nevertheless I 
feel all the force of your inquiry. It was the 
last little instinctive stratagem that love in- 
duced me to play, even when I was going to 
put on the whole force of my character and my 
love of truth ! for I did indeed believe that you 
would discard me, though I was not so sure of 
it as I pretended." 

" There, sir," said Pomona, colouring in all 
the beauty of joy and love, " there is my hand. 
I give it to the lover of truth ; but truth no 
less forces me to acknowledge, that my heart 
had not been unshaken by some former occur- 
rences." 

" Charming and adorable creature ! " cried 
our hero, after he had recovered from the kiss 
which he gave her. But here we leave them 
to themselves. Our heroine confessed, that 
from what she now knew of her feelings, she 
must have been inclined to look with com- 
passion on him before ; but added, that she 
never could have been sure she loved him, 
much less had the courage to tell him so, 
till she had known him in his own candid 
shape. 

And this, and no other, is the true story of 
Vertumnus and Pomona. 



THE GRACES AND ANXIETIES OF PIG-DRIVING. 



75 



IX.— ON THE GRACES AND ANXIETIES 
OF PIG-DRIVING. 

From the perusal of this article we beg leave 
to warn off vulgar readers of all denominations, 
whether of the "great vulgar or the small." 
Warn, did we say ? We drive them off ; for 
Horace tells us that they, as well as pigs, are 
to be so treated. Odi profanum vulgus, says he, 
et arceo. But do thou lend thine ear, gentle 
shade of Goldsmith, who didst make thy bear- 
leader denounce " everything as is low ; " and 
thou, Steele, who didst humanise upon public- 
houses and puppet-shows ; and Fielding, thou 
whom the great Richardson, less in that matter 
(and some others) than thyself, did accuse of 
vulgarity, because thou didst discern natural 
gentility in a footman, and yet was not to be 
taken in by the airs of Pamela and my Lady G. 

The title is a little startling ; but " style and 
sentiment," as a lady said, " can do anything." 
Remember, then, gentle reader, that talents 
are not to be despised in the humblest walks 
of life ; we will add, nor in the muddiest. The 
other day we happened to be among a set of 
spectators, who could not help stopping to 
admire the patience and address with which 
a pig-driver huddled and cherished onward his 
drove of unaccommodating eleves, down a street 
in the suburbs. He was a born genius for a 
manoeuvre. Had he originated in a higher 
sphere, he would have been a general, or a 
stage-manager, or at least the head of a set of 
monks. Conflicting interests were his forte ; 
pig-headed wills, and proceedings hopeless. 
To see the hand with which he did it ! How 
hovering, yet firm ; how encouraging, yet 
compelling ; how indicative of the space on 
each side of him, and yet of the line before 
him ; how general, how particular, how per- 
fect ! No barber's could quiver about a head 
with more lightness of apprehension ; no cook's 
pat up and proportion the side of a pasty with 
a more final eye. The whales, quoth old Chap- 
man, speaking of Neptune, 

The whales exulted under him, and knew their mighty king. 

The pigs did not exult, but they knew their 
king. Unwilling was their subjection, but 
" more in sorrow than in anger." They were 
too far gone for rage. Their case was hope- 
less. They did not see why they should pro- 
ceed, but they felt themselves bound to do so ; 
forced, conglomerated, crowded onwards, irre- 
sistibly impelled by fate and Jenkins. Often 
would they have bolted under any other master. 
They squeaked and grunted as in ordinary ; 
they sidled, they shuffled, they half stopped ; 
they turned an eye to all the little outlets of 
escape ; but in vain. There they stuck (for 
their very progress was a sort of sticking), 
charmed into the centre of his sphere of 
action, laying their heads together, but to no 



purpose ; looking all as if they were shrugging 
their shoulders, and eschewing the tip-end of 
the whip of office. Much eye had they to 
their left leg ; shrewd backward glances ; not 
a little anticipative squeak, and sudden rush 
of avoidance. It was a superfluous clutter, 
and they felt it ; but a pig finds it more diffi- 
cult than any other animal to accommodate 
himself to circumstances. Being out of his 
pale, he is in the highest state of wonderment 
and inaptitude. He is sluggish, obstinate, 
opinionate, not very social ; has no desire of 
seeing foreign parts. Think of him in a mul- 
titude, forced to travel, and wondering what 
the devil it is that drives him ! Judge by this 
of the talents of his driver. 

We beheld a man once, an inferior genius, 
inducting a pig into the other end of Long- 
lane, Smithfield. He had got him thus far 
towards the market. It was much. His air 
announced success in nine parts out of ten, 
and hope for the remainder. It had been a 
happy morning's work ; he had only to look 
for the termination of it ; and he looked (as a 
critic of an exalted turn of mind would say) 
in brightness and in joy. Then would he go 
to the public-house, and indulge in porter and 
a pleasing security. Perhaps he would not say 
much at first, being oppressed with the great- 
ness of his success ; but by degrees, especially 
if interrogated, he would open, like iEneas, 
into all the circumstances of his journey and 
the perils that beset him. Profound would be 
his set out ; full of tremor his middle course ; 
high and skilful his progress ; glorious, though 
with a quickened pulse, his triumphant entry 
Delicate had been his situation in Ducking- 
pond row ; masterly his turn at Bell-alley. 
We saw him with the radiance of some such 
thought on his countenance. He was just 
entering Long-lane. A gravity came upon 
him, as he steered his touchy convoy into this j 
his last thoroughfare. A dog moved him 
into a little agitation, darting along ; but he ' 
resumed his course, not without a happy i 
trepidation, hovering as he was on the borders 
of triumph. The pig still required care. It 
was evidently a pig with all the peculiar turn 
of mind of his species ; a fellow that would 
not move faster than he could help ; irritable ; 
retrospective ; picking objections, and prone to 
boggle ; a chap with a tendency to take every 
path but the proper one, and with a sidelong 
tact for the alleys. 

He bolts ! 

He's off ! — Evasit ! empit ! 

" Oh, Ch — st ? " exclaimed the man, dashing 
his hand against his head, lifting his knee in 
an agony, and screaming with all the weight 
of a prophecy which the spectators felt to be 
too true — " He'll go up all manner of streets ! " 

Poor fellow ! we think of him now some- 
times, driving up Duke-street, and not to be 
comforted in Barbican. 



76 



THE COMPANION. 



X.— PANTOMIMES. 

He that says he does not like a pantomime, 
either says what he does not think, or is not so 
wise as he fancies himself. He should grow 
young again, and get wiser. " The child," as 
the poet says, " is father to the man ; " and in 
this instance, he has a very degenerate offspring. 
Yes : John Tomkins, aged 35, and not liking 
pantomimes, is a very unpromising little boy. 
Consider, Tomkins, you have still a serious 
regard for pudding, and are ambitious of being 
thought clever. Well, there is the Clown who 
will sympathise with you in dumplings ; and 
not to see into the cleverness of Harlequin's 
quips and metamorphoses, is to want a percep- 
tion, which other little boys have by nature. 
Not to like pantomimes, is not to like animal 
spirits ; it is not to like motion ; not to like 
love ; not to like a jest upon dulness and for- 
mality ; not to smoke one's uncle ; not to like 
to see a thump in the face ; not to laugh ; not 
to fancy ; not to like a holiday ; not to know 
the pleasure of sitting up at Christmas; not to 
sympathise with one's children ; not to remem- 
ber that we have been children ourselves ; nor 
that we shall grow old, and be as gouty as Panta- 
loon, if we are not as wise and as active as they. 

Not wishing to be dry on so pleasant a sub- 
ject, we shall waive the learning that is in us 
on the origin of these popular entertainments. 
It will be sufficient to observe, that among the 
Italians, from whom we borrowed them, they 
consisted of a run of jokes upon the provincial 
peculiarities of their countrymen. Harlequin, 
with his giddy vivacity, was the representative 
of the inhabitant of one state ; Pantaloon, of 
the imbecile carefulness of another ; the clown, 
of the sensual, macaroni-eating Neapolitan, 
with his instinct for eschewing danger ; and 
Columbine, Harlequin's mistress, was the type, 
not indeed of the outward woman (for the 
young ladies were too restrained in that 
matter), but of the inner girl of all the lasses 
in Italy, — the tender fluttering heart, — the 
little dove (colombina), ready to take flight with 
the first lover, and to pay off old scores with 
the gout and the jealousy, that had hitherto 
kept her in durance. 

The reader has only to transfer the characters 
to those of his own countrymen, to have a 
lively sense of the effect which these national 
pictures must have had in Italy. Imagine 
Harlequin a gallant adventurer from some 
particular part of the land, full of life and 
fancy, sticking at no obstacles, leaping gates 
and windows, hitting off a satire at every turn, 
and converting the very scrapes he gets in, to 
matters of jest and triumph. The old gentle- 
man that pursues him, is a miser from some 
manufacturing town, whose ward he has run 
away with. The Clown is a London cockney, 
with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and 
muffins, — a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved " every- 



thing that was good ; " and Columbine is the 
boarding-school girl, ripe for running away 
with, and making a dance of it all the way 
from Chelsea to Gretna Green. 

Pantomime is the only upholder of comedy, 
when there is nothing else to show for it. It 
is the satirist, or caricaturist of the times, 
ridiculing the rise and fall of hats and funds, 
the growth of aldermen or of bonnets, the pre- 
tences of quackery ; and watching innovations 
of all sorts, lest change be too hasty. But this 
view of it is for the older boys. For us, who, 
upon the strength of our sympathy, boast of 
being among the young ones, its life, its motion, 
its animal spirits, are the thing. We sit among 
the shining faces on all sides of us, and fancy 
ourselves at this moment enjoying it. What 
whim ! what fancy ! what eternal movement ! 
The performers are like the blood in one's 
veins, never still; and the music runs with 
equal vivacity through the whole spectacle, 
like the pattern of a watered ribbon. 

In comes Harlequin, demi-masked, party- 
coloured, nimble-toed, lithe, agile; bending 
himself now this way, now that ; bridling up 
like a pigeon ; tipping out his toe like a dancer ; 
then taking a fantastic skip ; then standing 
ready at all points, and at right angles with 
his omnipotent lath-sword, the emblem of the 
converting power of fancy and light-hearted- 
ness. Giddy as we think him, he is resolved 
to show us that his head can bear more giddi- 
ness than we fancy ; and lo ! beginning with 
it by degrees, he whirls it round into a very 
spin, with no more remorse than if it were a 
button. Then he draws his sword, slaps his 
enemy, who has just come upon him, into a 
settee ; and springing upon him, dashes through 
the window like a swallow. Let us hope that 
Columbine and the high road are on the other 
side, and that he is already a mile on the road 
to Gretna : for 

Here comes Pantaloon, with his stupid ser- 
vant ; not the Clown, but a proper grave 
blockhead, to keep him in heart with himself. 
What a hobbling old rascal it is ! How void 
of any handsome infirmity ! His very gout is 
owing to his having lived upon twopence far- 
thing. Not finding Harlequin and Columbine, 
he sends his servant to look in the further part 
of the house, while he hobbles back to see what 
has become of that lazy fellow the Clown. 

He, the cunning rogue, who has been watch- 
ing mid-way, and now sees the coast clear, 
enters in front, — round-faced, goggle-eyed, 
knock-kneed, but agile to a degree of the dis- 
located, with a great smear for his mouth, and 
a cap on his head, half fool's and half cook's. 
Commend him to the dinner that he sees on 
table, and that was laid for Harlequin and his 
mistress. Merry be their hearts : there is a 
time for all things; and while they dance 
through a dozen inns to their hearts' content, 
he will eat a Sussex dumpling or so. Down 



CRUELTY TO CHILDREN. 



77 



he sits, contriving a luxurious seat, and inviting 
himself with as many ceremonies as if he had 
the whole day before him : but when he once 
begins, he seems as if he had not a moment to 
lose. The dumpling vanishes at a cram : — the 
sausages are abolished : — down go a dozen 
yards of macaroni : and he is in the act of 
paying his duties to a gallon of rum, when in 
come Pantaloon and his servant at opposite 
doors, both in search of the glutton, both 
furious, and. both resolved to pounce on the 
rascal headlong. They rush forward accord- 
ingly ; he slips from between them with a 
" Hallo, I say ;" and the two poor devils dash 
their heads against one another, like rams. 
They rebound fainting asunder to the stage- 
doors : while the Clown, laughing with all his 
shoulders, nods a health to each, and finishes 
his draught. He then holds a great cask of a 
snuff-box to each of their noses, to bring them 
to ; and while they are sneezing and tearing 
their souls out, jogs off at his leisure. 

Ah — here he is again on his road, Harlequin 
with his lass, fifty miles advanced in an hour, 
and caring nothing for his pursuers, though 
they have taken the steam-coach. Now the 
lovers dine indeed ; and having had no motion 
to signify, join in a dance. Here Columbine 
shines as she ought to do. The little slender, 
but plump rogue ! How she winds it hither 
and thither with her trim waist, and her waxen 
arms ! now with a hand against her side, 
tripping it with no immodest insolence in a 
hornpipe ; now undulating it in a waltz ; or 
u caracoling" it, as Sir Thomas Urquhart would 
say, in the saltatory style of the opera ; — but 
always Columbine ; always the little dove who 
is to be protected ; something less than the 
opera-dancer, and greater ; more unconscious, 
yet not so ; and ready to stretch her gauze 
wings for a flight, the moment Riches would 
tear her from Love. 

But these introductions of the characters by 
themselves do not give a sufficient idea of the 
great pervading spirit of the pantomime, which 
is motion ; motion for ever, and motion all at 
once. Mr. Jacob Bryant, who saw everything 
in anything, and needed nothing but the taking 
a word to pieces to prove that his boots and 
the constellation Bootes were the same thing, 
would have recognised in the word Pantomime 
the Anglo-antediluvian compound, a Pant-o 1 - 
mimes ! that is to say, a set of Mimes or Mimics, 
all panting together. Or he would have de- 
tected the obvious Anglo-Greek meaning of a 
set of Mimes, expressing Pan, or Every-thing, 
by means of the Toe,— Pan-Toe-Mime. Be 
this as it may, Pantomime is certainly a repre- 
sentation of the vital principle of all things, 
from the dance of the planets down to that of 
Damon and Phillis. Everything in it keeps 
moving ; there is no more cessation than there 
is in nature ; and though we may endeavour to 
fix our attention upon one mover or set of 



movers at a time, we are conscious that all are 
going on. The Clown, though we do not see 
him, is jogging somewhere; — Pantaloon and 
his servant, like Saturn and his ring, are still 
careering it behind their Mercury and Yenus ; 
and when Harlequin and Columbine come in, 
do we fancy they have been resting behind the 
scenes ? The notion ! Look at them : they 
are evidently in full career : they have been, 
as well as are, dancing ; and the music, which 
never ceases whether they are visible or not, 
tells us as much. 

Let readers, of a solemn turn of mistake, 
disagree with us if they please, provided they 
are ill-humoured. The erroneous, of a better 
nature, we are interested in; having known 
what it is to err like them. These are apt to 
be mistaken out of modesty (sometimes out of 
apardonable vanity in wishing to be esteemed) ; 
and in the case before us, they will sin against 
the natural candour of their hearts by con- 
demning an entertainment which they enjoy, 
because they think it a mark of sense to do so. 
Let them know themselves to be wiser than 
those who are really of that opinion. There 
is nothing wiser than a cheerful pulse, and all 
innocent things which tend to keep it so. The 
crabbedest philosopher that ever lived (if he 
was a philosopher, and crabbed against his 
will) would have given thousands to feel as 
they do ; and he would have known, that it 
redounded to his honour and not to his disgrace, 
to own it. 



XI.-CRUELTY TO CHILDREN. 

Readers of newspapers are constantly being 
shocked with the unnatural conduct of parents 
towards their children. Some are detected in 
locking them up and half-starving them; 
others tax them beyond their strength, and 
scourge them dreadfully for not bearing it ; 
others take horrible dislikes to their children, 
and vex and torture them in every way they 
can think of, short of subjecting themselves to 
the gallows. In most cases the tyranny is of 
long duration before it is exposed. A whole 
neighbourhood are saddened by the cries of the 
poor victim, till they are obliged to rise up in 
self-defence and bring the criminal to justice. 
By this we may judge how many miseries are 
taking place of which people have no sus- 
picion ; how many wretches have crimes of 
this sort, to account for the evil in their looks ; 
and how many others, more criminal because 
more lying, go about in decent repute, while 
some oppressed and feeble relative, awfully 
patient, is awaiting in solitude the horror of 
the returning knock at the door. 

It is alleged by offenders of this description, 
that the children are vicious and provoking ; 
that their conduct is very " aggravating," as 
the phrase is ; and that " nothing can mend 



its 



THE COMPANION. 



them but blows," — which never do. But 
whence come the faults of children ? and how 
were they suffered to grow to such a height ? 
Really, — setting aside these monsters of unpa- 
ternity, — parents are apt to demand a great 
many virtues in their children, which they do 
not themselves possess. The child, on the 
mere strength of their will, and without any 
of their experience, is expected to have good 
sense, good temper, and Heaven knows how 
many other good qualities ; while the parents 
perhaps, notwithstanding all the lessons they 
have received from time and trouble, have 
little or nothing of any of them. Above all, 
they forget that, in originating the bodies of 
their children, they originate their minds and 
temperaments ; that a child is but a continua- 
tion of his father and mother, or their fathers 
and mothers, and kindred ; that it is further 
modified and made what it is by education and 
bringing up ; and that on all these accounts 
the parents have no excuse for abusing and 
tormenting it ; unless with equal wisdom and 
a glorious impartiality they should abuse and 
torment themselves in like manner, — scourge 
their own flesh, and condemn themselves to a 
crust and a black hole. If a father were to 
give his own sore legs a good flogging for in- 
heriting ill-humours from his ancestors, he might 
with some show of reason proceed to punish the 
continuation of them in those of his child. If 
a cruel mother got into a handsome tub of cold 
water of a winter morning, and edified the 
neighbours with the just and retributive 
shrieks which she thence poured forth for a 
couple of hours, crying out to her deceased 
" mammy " that she would be a good elderly 
woman in future, and not a scold and a repro- 
bate, then she might like a proper mad woman 
(for she is but an improper one now) put her 
child into the tub after her, and make it shriek 
out "mammy " in its turn. 

But let us do justice to all one's fellow- 
creatures, not forgetting these very " aggra- 
vating " parents. To regard them as something 
infernal, and forget that they, as well as their 
children, have become what they are from cir- 
cumstances over which they had no control, is 
to fall into their own error, and forget our 
common humanity. We believe that the very 
worst of these domestic tyrants (and it is an 
awful lesson for the best of them) would have 
been shocked in early life, if they could have 
been shown, in a magic glass, what sort of beings 
they would become. Suppose one of them a 
young man, blooming with health, and not ill- 
natured, but subject to fits of sulkiness or 
passion, and not very wise ; and suppose that 
in this glass he sees an old ill-looking fellow, 
scowling, violent, outrageous, tormenting with 
a bloody scourge his own child, who is meagre, 
squalid, and half-starved, — " Good God ! " he 
would cry, " can that be myself ? Can that be 
my arm, and my face ? And that my own poor 



little child ? There are devils then, and I am 
doomed to be one of them." And the tears 
would pour into his eyes. No : not so, poor 
wretch : thou art no devil, — there is no such 
thing as devilishness or pure malice for its own 
sake ; the very cruellest actions are com- 
mitted to relieve the cravings of the perpe- 
trator's want of excitement, more than to hurt 
another. But though no devil, you are very 
ignorant, and are not aware of your ignorance. 
The energies of the universe, being on a great 
scale, are liable, in their progress from worse 
to better, to great roughness in the working, 
and appalling sounds of discord. The wiser 
you become, the more you diminish this jarring, 
and tend to produce that amelioration. Learn 
this, and be neither appalled nor appalling ; or 
if your reflections do not travel so far, and you 
are in no danger of continuing your evil course 
by the subtle desperations of superstition, be 
content to know, that nobody ill-treats another, 
who is satisfied with his own conduct. If the 
case were otherwise, it would be worse ; for 
you would not have the excuse, even of a 
necessity for relieving your own sensations. 
But it never is so, sophisticate about it as you 
may. The very pains you take to reconcile 
yourself to yourself, may show you how much 
need you have of doing so. It is nothing else 
which makes the silliest little child sulky ; 
and the same folly makes the grown man a 
tyrant. When you begin to ill-treat your 
child, you begin to punish in him your . own 
faults ; and you most likely do nothing but 
beat them in upon him with every stroke of 
the scourge : for why should he be wiser than 
you ? Why should he be able to throw off the 
ill-humours of which your greater energies 
cannot get rid ? 

These thoughts we address to those who are 
worthy of them ; and who, not being tyrants, 
may yet become such, for want of reflection. 
Vulgar offenders can be mended only with the 
whole progress of society, and the advance- 
ment of education. There is one thing we 
must not omit to say, which is, that the best 
parents are apt to expect too much of their 
children, and to forget how much error they 
may have committed in the course of bringing 
them up. Nobody is in fault, in a criminal 
sense. Children have their excuses, and 
parents have their excuses ; but the wiser 
any of us become, the less we exact from 
others, and the more we do to deserve their 
regard. The great art of being a good parent 
consists in setting a good example, and in 
maintaining that union of dispassionate firm- 
ness with habitual good-humour, which a child 
never thinks of treating with disrespect. 

We have here been speaking principally of the 
behaviour of parents to little children. When 
violent disputes take place between parents 
and children grown up,— young men and 
women, — there are generally great faults on 



HOUSES ON FIRE. 



7» 



both sides ; though, for an obvious reason, the 
parent, who has had the training and forma- 
tion of the other, is likely to be most in the 
wrong. But unhappily, very excellent people 
may sometimes find themselves hampered in a 
calamity of this nature ; and out of that sort 
of weakness which is so often confounded 
with strength, turn their very sense of being 
in the right, to the same hostile and implacable 
purpose as if it were the reverse. We can 
only say, that from all we have seen in the 
world, and indeed from the whole experience 
of mankind, they who are conscious of being 
right, are the first to make a movement towards 
reconciliation, let the cause of quarrel be what 
it may ; and that there is no surer method, in 
the eyes of any who know what human na- 
ture is, both to sustain the real dignity of the 
right side, and to amend the wrong one. To 
kind-hearted fathers in general, who have 
the misfortune to get into a dilemma of this 
sort, we would recommend the pathetic story 
of a French general, who was observed, after 
the death of his son in battle, never to hold 
up his head. He said to a friend, " My boy 
was used to think me severe ; and he had too 
much reason to do so. He did not know how 
I loved him at the bottom of my heart ; and it 
is now too late" 



XII.— HOUSES ON FIRE. 

It is astonishing how little imagination 
there is in the world, in matters not affecting 
men's immediate wants and importance. Peo- 
ple seem to require a million thumps on the 
head, before they can learn to guard against a 
head-ache. This would be little ; but the 
greater the calamity, the less they seem to 
provide against it. All the fires in this great 
metropolis, and the frightful catastrophes 
which are often the result, do not show the 
inhabitants that they ought to take measures 
to guard against them, and that these measures 
are among the easiest things in the world. 
Every man who has a family, and whose house 
is too high to allow of jumping out of the win- 
dows, ought to consider himself bound to have 
a fire-escape. What signifies all the care he 
has taken to be a good husband or father, and 
all the provision he has made for the well- 
being of his children in after-life, if in one 
frightful moment, in the dead of night, with 
horror glaring in their faces, and tender and 
despairing words swallowed up in burning and 
suffocation, — amidst cracking beams and raf- 
ters, sinking floors, and a whole yielding gulf 
of agony, — they are all to cease to be ! — to 
perish like so many vermin in a wall ! Fire- 
escapes, even if they are not made so already 
(as we believe they are) can evidently be con- 
structed in a most easy, cheap, and commo- 
dious manner. A basket and a double rope 



are sufficient ; or two or three would be better. 
It is the sudden sense of the height at which 
people sleep, and the despair of escape which 
consequently seizes them, for want of some 
such provision, that disables them from think- 
ing of any other resources. Houses, it is true, 
generally have trap-doors to the roof; but 
these are not kept in readiness for use ; a lad- 
der is wanting ; or the door is hard to be got 
up ; the passage to it is difficult, or involved in 
the fire ; and the roof may not be a safe one to 
walk over ; children cannot act for themselves ; 
terror affects the older people ; and, therefore, 
on all these accounts, nothing is more desirable 
than that the means of escape should be at 
hand, should be facile, and capable of being 
used in concert with the multitude below. 
People out of doors are ever ready and anxious 
to assist. Those brave fellows, the firemen, 
would complete the task, if time allowed, and 
circumstances had hitherto prevented it ; and 
handle the basket and the little riders in it, 
with confidence, like so many chickens. A 
time perhaps will come, when every window 
in a high bed-chamber will have an escape to 
it, as a matter of course ; but it is a terrible 
pity, meanwhile, that for want of a little ima- 
gination out of the common pale of their Mon- 
days and Wednesdays, a whole metropolis, 
piquing themselves on their love of their 
families, should subject themselves and the 
dearest objects of their affection to these in- 
fernal accidents. 

In an honest state of society, houses would 
all communicate with one another by common 
doors ; and families destroyed by fire would 
be among the monstrosities of history. 



Xm.-A BATTLE OF ANTS.— DESIRABLENESS OF 
DRAWING A DISTINCTION BETWEEN POWERS 
COMMON TO OTHER ANIMALS, AND THOSE 
PECULIAR TO MAN. 

Taking up, the other day, a number of the 
Edinburgh Journal of Science, we met with the 
following account of a battle of ants. It is 
contained in the notice of a memoir by M. 
Hanhart, who describes the battle as having 
taken place between two species of these in- 
sects, " one the formica rufa, and the other a 
little black ant, which he does not name (pro- 
bably the fofusca)." In other respects, as the 
reviewer observes, the subject is not new, the 
celebrated Huber having described a battle of 
this kind before ; but as natural history lies 
out of the way of many readers (though calcu- 
lated to please them all, if they are genuine 
readers of anything), and as it has suggested 
to us a few remarks which may further the 
objects we have in writing, the account shall 
be here repeated. 

" M. Hanhart saw these insects approach in 
armies composed of their respective swarms, 



60 



THE COMPANION. 



and advancing towards each other in the great- 
est order. The Formica rufa marched with 
one in front, on a line from nine to twelve feet 
in length, flanked by several corps in square 
masses, composed of from twenty to sixty in- 
dividuals. 

" The second species (little blacks), forming 
an army much more numerous, marched to 
meet the enemy on a very extended line, and 
from one to three individuals abreast. They 
left a detachment at the foot of their hillock to 
defend it against any unlooked-for attack. The 
rest of the army marched to battle, with its 
right wing supported by a solid corps of several 
hundred individuals, and the left wing sup- 
ported by a similar body of more than a 
thousand. These groups advanced in the 
greatest order, and without changing their 
positions. The two lateral corps took no part 
in the present action. That of the right wing 
made a halt and formed an army of reserve ; 
whilst the corps which marched in column on 
the left wing, manoeuvred so as to turn the 
hostile army, and advanced with a hurried 
march to the hillock of the Formica rufa, and 
took it by assault. 

" The two armies attacked each other, and 
fought for a long time, without breaking their 
lines. At length disorder appeared in various 
points, and the combat was maintained in 
detached groups ; and after a bloody battle, 
which continued from three to four hours, the 
Formica rufa were put to flight, and forced to 
abandon their two hillocks and go off to esta- 
blish themselves at some other point with the 
remains of their army. 

" The most interesting part of this exhibi- 
tion, says M. Hanhart, was to see these insects 
reciprocally making prisoners, and transport- 
ing their own wounded to their hillocks. Their 
devotedness to the wounded was carried so far 
that the Formica rufa, in conveying them to 
their nests, allowed themselves to be killed by 
the little blacks without any resistance, rather 
than abandon their precious charge. 

" From the observations of M. Huber, it is 
known that when an ant hillock is taken by 
the enemy, the vanquished are reduced to 
slavery, and employed in the interior labours 
of their habitation." — Bull. Unix. Mai 1826. 

There is no sort of reason, observe, to mis- 
trust these accounts. The " lords of creation" 
may be slow in admitting the approaches of 
other animals to a common property in what 
they consider eminently human and skilful ; 
but ants, in some of their habits, have a great 
resemblance to bees ; and after what is now 
universally known respecting the polity and 
behaviour of the bees, the doubt will rather 
be, whether a share in the arts of war and 
government is not possessed by a far greater 
number of beings than we have yet discovered. 

Here then, among a set of little creatures 
not bigger than grains of rice, is war in its 



regular human shape; war, not only in its 
violence, but its patriotism or fellow-feeling ; 
and not only in its patriotism, (which in our 
summary mode of settling all creatures' affec- 
tions but our own, might be referred to in- 
stinct,) but war in its science and battle array! 
The red ants make their advance in a line 
from nine to twelve feet in length, flanked by 
several corps in square masses ; the " little 
blacks," more numerous, come up three abreast, 
leaving a detachment at the foot of their hillock 
to defend against unlooked-for attack. There 
are wings, right and left ; they halt ; they form 
an army of reserve ; one side manoeuvres so 
as to turn the other ; the hillock is taken by 
assault ; the lines are broken ; and in fine, 
after a " bloody battle" of three or four hours, 
the red ants are put to flight. 

What is there different in all this from a battle 
of Waterloo or Malplaquet ? We look down 
upon these little energetic and skilful creatures, 
as beings of a similar disproportion might look 
upon us ; and do we not laugh ? We may for 
an instant, — thinking of the little Wellingtons 
and Napoleons that may have led them ; but 
such laughter is found to be wrong on reflection, 
and is left to those who do not reflect at all, 
and who would be the first to resent laughter 
against themselves. 

What then do we do ? Are we to go into 
a corner, and effeminately weep over the mi- 
series of the formican, as well as the human, 
race ? saying how short is the life of ant ! 
and that Fourmis cometh up, and is cut down 
like a Frenchman ? By no means. But we 
may contribute, by our reflections, an atom to 
the sum of human advancement ; and if men 
advance, all the creatures of this world, for 
aught we know, may advance with them, or 
the places in which evil is found be dimin- 
ished. 

A little before we read this account of the 
battle of the ants, we saw pass by our window 
a troop of horse ; a set of gallant fellows, on 
animals almost as noble ; the band playing, 
and colours flying ; a strenuous sight ; a pro- 
gress of human hearts and thick-coming, 
trampling hoofs ; a crowd of wills, composed 
into order and beauty by the will of another ; 
ready death in the most gallant shape of life ; 
self-sacrifice taking out its holiday of admira- 
tion in the eyes of the feeble and the heroical, 
and moving through the sunshine to sounds of 
music, as if one moment of the very show of 
sympathy were worth any price, even to its 
own confusion. 

Was it all this ? or was it nothing but a set 
of more imposing animals, led by others about 
half as thoughtless ? Was it an imposition on 
themselves as well as the public, enticing the 
poor souls to be dressed up for the slaughter ? 
a mass of superfluous human beings, cheated 
to come together, in order, as Mr. Malthus 
thinks, that the superfluity may be got rid of, 



MILITARY INSECTS. 



31 



and the great have elbow-room at their feasts? 
or was it simply, as other philosophers think, 
because human experience is still in its boy- 
hood, and men, in some respects, are not yet 
beyond the ants ? 

The sight of one of these military shows is, 
to us, the most elevating and the most humi- 
liating thing in the world. It seems at once to 
raise us to the gods, and to sink us to the 
brutes. We feel of what noble things men 
are capable, and into what half-w T itted things 
they may be deluded. At one moment we 
seem to ride in company with them to some glo- 
rious achievement, and rejoice in constituting 
a part of all that strength and warm blood 
which is to be let out for some great cause. 
At the next, they appear to us a parcel of poor 
fools tricked, and tricked out ; and we, because 
we are poorer ones, who see without being able 
to help it, must fain have the feeble tears come 
in our eyes. Oh ! in that sorry little looking- 
glass of a tear, how many great human shows 
have been reflected, and made less ! 

But these weaknesses belong to the physical 
part of us. Philosophy sees farther, and hopes 
all. That war is an unmixed evil, we do not 
believe. We are sure it is otherwise. It sets 
in motion many noble qualities, and (in default 
of a better instrument) often does a great deal 
of good. That it is not, at the same time, a 
great and monstrous evil, we believe as little. 
One field, after a battle, with the cries of the 
wounded and the dying, the dislocations, the 
tortures, the defeatures, and the dismember- 
ings, the dreadful lingering (perhaps on a 
winter's night), the shrieks for help, and the 
agonies of mortal thirst, — is sufficient to do 
away all shallow and blustering attempts to 
make us take the show of it for the substance. 
Even if we had no hope that the world could 
ever get rid of war, we should not blind our- 
selves to this its ghastly side ; for its evils 
would then accumulate for want of being con- 
sidered ; and it is better at all times to look a 
truth manfully in the face, than trust for secu- 
rity ourselves, or credulity from others, to an 
effeminate hiding of our eyes. But the same 
love of truth that disguises nothing, may hope 
everything ; and it is this that shall carry the 
world forward to benefits unthought of, if men 
of genius once come to set it up as their guide 
and standard. 

What we intended by our present article was 
this : to suggest, whether we ought to value 
ourselves on any custom or skill which we 
possess in common with the lower animals ; or 
whether we ought not rather to consider the 
participation as an argument, that, in that 
respect, we have not yet got beyond the com- 
monest instinct. If the military conduct of 
the ants be not instinct (or whatsoever human 
pride pleases to understand by that term), then 
are they in possession, so far, of human reason, 
and so far w r e do not see beyond them. If it 

[PAET II.] 



be instinct, then war, and the conduct of it, ! 
are not the great things we suppose them ; and 
a Wellington and a Washington may bat follow 
the impulse of some mechanical energy, just as 
some insects are supposed to construct their 
dwellings in a particular shape, because they 
partake of it in their own conformation. In 
either case, we conceive, we ought to remind 
ourselves, that the greatest distinction hitherto 
discovered between men and other creatures 
is, that the human being is capable of improve- 
ment, and of seeing beyond the instincts common 
to all. Therefore, war is not a thing we arrive 
at after great improvement ; it is a thing we 
begin with, before any ; and what we take for 
improvements in the mode of conducting it, 
are only the result of such circumstances as 
can be turned to account by creatures no higher 
in the scale of being than insects. 

We make very disingenuous use of the lower 
animals, in our reasonings and analogies. If 
we wish to degrade a man, we say he acts like 
a brute ; — if, on the other hand, we would 
vindicate any part of our conduct as especially 
natural and proper, we say the very brutes do 
it. Now, in one sense of the word, everything 
is natural which takes place within the whole 
circle of nature ; and being animals ourselves, 
we partake of much that is common to all 
animals. But if we are to pique ourselves on 
our superiority, it is evident that we are 
superior in proportion as we are rationally and 
deliberately different from the animals beneath 
us ; while they, on the other hand, have a right 
to share our ft glory," or to pull it down, ac- 
cording to the degrees in which they resemble 
us. 

The conclusion is, that we ought attentively 
to consider in what points the resemblance is 
to be found, and in what we leave them mani- 
festly behind. Creatures who differ from our- 
selves may, it is true, have perceptions of 
which we are incapable, perhaps nobler ones ; 
but this is a mere assumption : we can only 
reason from what we know ; and it is to be 
presumed, that they are as inferior to us in all 
which we reckon intellectual and capable of 
advancement, as they are known to be so in 
general by their subjection to our uses, by the 
helps which we can afford them, by the mis- 
takes they make, the points at which they 
stop short, and the manner in which we can 
put to flight their faculties, and whole myriads 
of tbem. 

What faculties then have beasts and insects 
in common with us ? What can they do, that 
we do also ? — Let us see. Beavers can build 
houses, and insects of various sorts can build 
cells. Birds also construct themselves dwelling- 
places suitable to their nature. The orang- 
outang can be taught to put on clothes ; he can 
sit up and take his wine at dinner; and the 
squirrel can play his part in a dessert, as far 
as the cracking of nuts. Animals, in general, 



82 



THE COMPANION. 



love personal cleanliness, and eat no more than 
is fit for them, but can be encouraged into 
great sensuality. Bees have a monarchical 
government : foxes understand trick and stra- 
tagem ; so do hundreds of other animals, from 
the dog down to the dunghill-beetle ; many 
are capable of pride and emulation, more of 
attachment, and all of fear, of anger, of hos- 
tility, or other impulses for self-defence ; and 
all perhaps are susceptible of improvement 
from without ; that is to say, by the help of man. 
Seals will look on while their young ones fight, 
and pat and caress the conqueror ; and now it 
is discovered that ants can conduct armies to 
battle, can make and rescue prisoners, and turn 
them to account. Huber, in addition to these 
discoveries, found out that they possessed a 
sort of cattle in a species of aphides, and that 
they made them yield a secretion for food, as 
we obtain milk from the cows. It appears to 
be almost equally proved, that animals have 
modes of communicating with one another, 
analogous to speech. Insects are supposed to 
interchange a kind of dumb language, — to talk, 
as it were, with fingers, — by means of their 
antennae ; and it is difficult to believe, that in 
the songs of birds there is not both speech and 
inflection, communications in the gross, and 
expressions modified by the occasion. 

Let the reader, however, as becomes his 
philosophy, take from all this whatever is 
superfluous or conjectural, and enough will 
remain to show, that the least and lowest 
animals, as well as man, can furnish themselves 
with dwellings ; can procure food ; can trick 
and deceive ; are naturally clean and temperate, 
but can be taught to indulge their senses ; have 
the ordinary round of passions ; encourage the 
qualities necessary to vigour and self-defence ; 
have polity and kingly government ; can make 
other animals of use to them ; and finally, can 
make war, and conduct armies to battle in the 
most striking modes of human strategy. 

Animals in general, therefore, include among 
themselves 

Masons, or house-builders ; 

Getters of bread ; 

Common followers of the senses ; 

Common-place imitators ; 

Pursuers of their own interest, in cunning 

as well as in simplicity ; 
Possessors of the natural affections ; 
Encouragers of valour and self-exertion ; 
Monarchs and subjects ; 
Warriors, and leaders to battle. 

"Whatever, among men, is reducible to any of 
these classes, is to be found among beasts, birds, 
and insects. We are not to be ashamed of 
anything we have in common with them, 
merely because we so have it. On the con- 
trary, we are to be glad that any quality, useful 
or noble, is so universal in the creation. But 
whatever we discern among them, of sordid or 



selfish, there, without condemning them, we 
may see the line drawn, beyond which we can 
alone congratulate ourselves on our humanity ; 
and whatever skill they possess in common 
with us, there we are to begin to doubt whether 
we have any reason to pique ourselves on our 
display of it, and from that limit we are to 
begin to consider what they do not possess. 

We have often had a suspicion, that military 
talent is greatly overrated by the world, and 
for an obvious reason : because the means by 
which it shows itself are connected with brute 
force and the most terrible results ; and men's 
faculties are dazzled and beaten down by a 
thunder and lightning so formidable to their 
very existence. If playing a game of chess 
involved the blowing up of gunpowder and the 
hazard of laying waste a city, men would have 
the same grand idea of a game at chess ; 
and yet we now give it no more glory than it 
deserves. Now it is doubtful, whether the 
greatest military conqueror, considered purely 
as such, and not with reference to his accidental 
possession of other talents, such as those of 
Caesar and Xenophon, is not a mere chess- 
player of this description, with the addition of 
greater self-possession. His main faculty is 
of the geometrical or proportion-giving order ; 
of which it is remarkable, that it is the only 
one, ranking high among those of humanity, 
which is partaken by the lowest ignorance and 
what is called pure instinct ; by arithmetical 
idiots, and architectural bees. Idiots have 
been known to solve difficult arithmetical 
questions, by taking a thought which they 
could do for no other purpose ; that is to say, 
by reference to some undiscovered faculty 
within them, that looks very like an instinct, 
and the result of the presence or absence of 
something, which is not common to higher 
organisation. In Jameson's Philosophical Journal 
for April,* is a conjecture, that the hexagonal 
plan of the cells of a hornet is derived from 
the structure of its fore-legs. It has often 
struck us, that the architecture of the cells of 
bees might be owing to a similar guidance of 
conformation ; and by the like analogy, extra- 
ordinary powers of arithmetic might be trace- 
able to some physical peculiarity, or a tendency 
to it ; such as the indication of a sixth finger 
on the hands of one of the calculating boys that 
were lately so much talked of. We have 
sometimes thought, that even the illustrious 
Newton had a face and a set of features singu- 
larly accordant with mathematical uniformity 
and precision. And there is a professional 
cast of countenance attributed, not perhaps 
without reason, to warriors of the more me- 



* See the Magazine of Natural History for July, a work 
lately set up. We beg leave to recommend thia, and all 
similar works, to the lovers of truth and inquiry in general ; 
physical discovery having greater alliance with moral 
than is suspected, and the habit of sincere investigation 
on all points being greatly encouraged by its existence pn 
any one. 



MILITARY INSECTS. 



83 



ehanical order. Washington's face was as cut 
and dry as a diagram. 

It may be argued, that whatever proofs may 
exist of the acquaintance of insects with the 
art of war, or at least with their power of 
joining battle under the ordinary appearances 
of skill and science, it does not follow that they 
conduct the matter with the real science of 
human beings, or that they are acquainted 
with our variety of tactics, or have made im- 
provements in them from time to time. We 
concede that in all probability there is a dis- 
tinction between the exercise of the most 
rational-looking instincts on the part of a lower 
animal, and the most instinctive-looking reason 
on the side of man ; but where the two classes 
have so much in common in any one particular, 
what we mean to show is, that in that particu- 
lar it is more difficult than in others to pro- 
nounce where the limit between conscious and 
unconscious skill is to be drawn ; and that so 
far, we have no pretension which other animals 
may not dispute with us. It has been often 
wondered, that a great general is not in other 
respects a man above the vulgar ; that he is 
not a better speaker than others ; a better 
writer, or thinker, or possessed of greater 
address ; in short, that he has no qualities but 
such as are essential to him in his military 
capacity. This again looks like a proof of the 
mechanical nature of a general's ability. We 
believe it may be said exclusively of military 
talents, and of one or two others connected 
with the mathematics, that they are the only 
ones capable of attaining to greatness and 
celebrity in their respective departments, with 
a destitution of taste or knowledge in every 
other. Every other great talent partakes more 
or less of a sympathy with greatness in other 
shapes. The fine arts have their harmonies 
in common : wit implies a stock of ideas : the 
legislator — (we do not mean the ordinary con- 
ductors of government, for they, as one of 
them said, require much less wisdom than the 
world supposes ; and it may be added, impose 
upon the world, somewhat in the same manner 
as military leaders, by dint of the size and 
potency of their operations) — the legislator 
makes a profound study of all the wants of 
mankind ; and poetry and philosophy show the 
height at which they live, by " looking abroad 
into universality." 

Far be it from us to undervalue the use of 
any science, especially in the hands of those 
who are capable of so looking abroad, and see- 
ing where it can advance the good of the com- 
munity. The commonest genuine soldier has 
a merit in his way, which we are far from 
disesteeming. Without a portion of his forti- 
tude, no man has a power to be useful. But 
we are speaking of intellects capable of leading 
society onwards, and not of instruments how- 
ever respectable : and unfortunately (generally 
speaking) the greatest soldiers are fit only to 



be instruments, not leaders. Once in a way it 
happens luckily that they suit the times they 
live in. Washington is an instance : and yet 
if ever great man looked like " a tool in the 
hands of Providence," it was he. He appears 
to have been always the same man, from first 
to last, employed or unemployed, known or 
unknown ; — the same steady, dry-looking, 
determined person, cut and carved like a 
piece of ebony, for the genius of the times to 
rule with. Before the work was begun, there he 
was, a sort of born patriarchal staff, governing 
herds and slaves ; and when the work was over, 
he was found in his old place, with the same 
carved countenance and the same stiff inflexi- 
bility, governing still. And his skives were 
found with him. This is what a soldier ought 
to be. Not indeed if the world were to advance 
by their means, and theirs only ; but that is 
impossible. Washington was only the sword 
with which Franklin and the spirit of revolution 
worked out their purposes ; and a sword should 
be nothing but a sword. The moment soldiers 
come to direct the intellect of their age, they 
make a sorry business of it. Napoleon himself 
did. Frederick did. Even Caesar failed. As 
to Alfred the Great, he was not so much a 
general fighting with generals, as a universal 
genius warring with barbarism and adversity ; 
and it took a load of sorrow to make even him 
the demigod he was. 

" Stand upon the ancient ways," says Bacon, 
" and see what steps may be taken for progres- 
sion." Look, for the same purpose (it may be 
said) upon the rest of the animal creation, and 
consider the qualities in which they have no 
share with you. Of the others, you may well 
doubt the greatness, considered as movers, and 
not instruments, towards progression. It is 
among the remainder you must seek for the 
advancement of your species. An insect can 
be a provider of the necessaries of life, and he 
can exercise power and organise violence. He 
can be a builder ; he can be a soldier ; he can 
be a king. But to all appearance, he is the 
same as he was ever, and his works perish with 
him. If insects have such and such an estab- 
lishment among them, we conceive they will 
have it always, unless men can alter it for 
them. If they have no such establishment, 
they appear of themselves incapable of admit- 
ting it. It is men only that add and improve. 
Men only can bequeath their souls for the 
benefit of posterity, in the shape of arts and 
books. Men only can philosophize, and reform, 
and cast off old customs, and take steps for 
laying the whole globe nearer to the sun of 
wisdom and happiness : and in proportion as 
you find them capable of so hoping and so 
working, you recognise their superiority to 
the brutes that perish. 



84 



THE COMPANION. 



XIV.— A WALK FROM DULWICH TO 
BROCKHAM. 

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND. 

With an original Circumstance or two respecting Dr. 
Johnson. 
Dear Sir, 

As other calls upon my pilgrimage in this 
world have interrupted those weekly voyages 
of discovery into green lanes and rustic houses 
of entertainment which you and I had so agree- 
ably commenced, I thought I could not do 
better than make you partaker of my new 
journey, as far as pen and paper could do it. 
You are therefore to look upon yourself as 
having resolved to take a walk of twenty or 
thirty miles into Surrey without knowing any- 
thing of the matter. You will have set out 
with us a fortnight ago, and will be kind enough 
to take your busts for chambermaids, and your 
music (which is not so easy) for the voices of 
stage-coachmen . 

Illness, you know, does not hinder me from 
walking ; neither does anxiety. On the con- 
trary, the more I walk, the better and stouter 
I become ; and I believe if everybody were to 
regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, 
as a signal from nature to get up and contend 
with it in that manner, people would find the 
benefit of it. This is more particularly the 
case if they are lovers of Nature, as well as 
pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties 
in which her visible world abounds ; and as I 
may claim the merit of loving her heartily, and 
even of tracing my sufferings (when I have 
them) to her cause, the latter are never so great 
but she repays me with some sense of sweet- 
ness, and leaves me a certain property in the 
delight of others, when I have little of my own. 

" O that I had the wings of a dove !" said 
the royal poet ; " then would I fly away and 
be at rest." I believe there are few persons, 
who having felt sorrow, and anticipating a 
journey not exactly towards it, have not par- 
taken of this sense of the desirability of remote- 
ness. A great deal of what we love in poetry 
is founded upon it ; nor do any feel it with 
more passion, than those whose sense of duty 
to their fellow-creatures will not allow them 
to regard retirement as anything but a refresh- 
ment between their tasks, and as a wealth of 
which all ought to partake. 

But David sighed for remoteness, and not 
for solitude. At least, if he did, the cares of 
the moment must have greatly overbalanced 
the habits of the poet. Neither doves nor 
poets can very well do without a companion. 
Be that as it may, the writer of this epistle, 
who is a still greater lover of companionship 
than poetry (and he cannot express his liking 
more strongly) had not the misfortune, on the 
present occasion, of being compelled to do 
without it ; and as to remoteness, though his 
pilgrimage was to extend little beyond twenty 



miles, he had not the less sense of it on that 
account. Remoteness is not how far you go in 
point of ground, but how far you feel yourself 
from your common-places. Literal distance is 
indeed necessary in some degree ; but the 
quantity of it depends on imagination and 
the nature of circumstances. The poet who 
can take to his wings like a dove, and plunge 
into the wood nearest him, is farther off, 
millions of miles, in the retreat of his thoughts, 
than the literalist, who must get to Johnny 
Groat's in order to convince himself that he is 
not in Edinburgh. 

Almost any companion would do, if we could 
not make our choice, provided it loved us and 
was sincere. A horse is good company, if 
you have no other ; a dog still better. I have 
have often thought, that I could take a chjld 
by the hand, and walk with it day after 
day towards the north or the east, a straight 
road, feeling as if it would lead into another 
world, 

" And think 'twould lead to some bright isle of rest." 

But I should have to go back, to fetch some 
grown friends. 

There were three of us on the present occa- 
sion, grown and young. "We began by taking 
the Dulwich stage from a house in Fleet-street, 
where a drunken man came into the tap, and 
was very pious. He recited hymns ; asked 
the landlady to shake hands with him ; was 
for making a sofa of the counter, which she 
prevented by thrusting his leg off with some 
indignation ; and being hindered in this piece 
of jollity, he sank on his knees to pray. 
He was too good-natured for a Methodist ; 
so had taken to stiff glasses of brandy-and- 
water, 

" To help him to support uneasy steps 
Over the burning marie." 

He said he had been " twice through the gates 
of hell ;" and by his drinking, poor fellow, he 
seemed to be setting out on his third adventure. 
We called him Sin-bad. By the way, when 
you were a boy, did you not think that the 
name of Sindbad was allegorical, and meant a 
man who had sinned very badly ? Does not 
every little boy think so ? One does not indeed, 
at that time of life, know very well what to 
make of the porter Hindbad, who rhymes to 
him ; and I remember I was not pleased when 
I came to find out that Hind and Sind were 
component words, and meant Eastern and 
Western. 

The stage took us to the Greyhound at Dul- 
wich, where, though we had come from another 
village almost as far off from London on the 
northern side, we felt as if we had newly got 
into the country, and ate a hearty supper 
accordingly. This was a thing not usual with 
us ; but then everybody eats " in the country ;" 
— there is "the air;" and besides, we had 
eaten little dinner, and were merrier, and 



A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM. 



85 



"remote.'* On looking out of our chamber 
window in the morning, we remarked that the 
situation of the inn was beautiful, even towards 
the road, the place is so rich with trees ; and 
returning to the room in which we had supped, 
we found with pleasure that we had a window 
there, presenting us with a peep into rich 
meadows, where the haymakers were at work 
in their white shirts. A sunny room, quiet, 
our remote five miles, and a pleasant subject 
(the Poetry of British Ladies) enabled the 
editorial part of us to go comfortably to our 
morning's task ; after which we left the inn to 
proceed on our journey. We had not seen 
Dulwich for many years, and were surprised 
to find it still so full of trees. It continues, at 
least in the quarter through which we passed, 
to deserve the recommendation given it by 



Dulwich, yet unspoil'd by art." 



He would have added, had he lived, now 
that art had come, even to make it better. It 
was with real pain, that two lovers of painting 
were obliged to coast the walls of the college 
without seeing the gallery : but we have vowed 
a pilgrimage very shortly to those remoter 
places, there to be found ; to wit, the land- 
scapes of Claude and Cuyp, and the houses of 
Rembrandt ; and we shall make report of it, 
to save our character. We know not whether 
it was the sultriness of the day, with occasional 
heavy clouds, but we thought the air of Dulwich 
too warm, and pronounced it a place of sleepy 
luxuriance. So it appeared to us that morning ; 
beautiful, however, and " remote ; " and the 
thought of old Allen, Shakspeare's playmate, 
made it still more so. 

I remember, in my boyhood, seeing Sir 
Francis Bourgeois (the bequeather of the 
Dulwich pictures) in company with Mr. West, 
in the latter's gallery in Newman-street. He 
was in buckskins and boots, dandy dress of that 
time, and appeared a lively, good-natured man, 
with a pleasing countenance, probably because 
he said something pleasant of myself ; he con- 
firmed it with an oath, which startled, but did 
not alter this opinion. Ever afterwards I had 
an inclination to like his pictures, which I 
believe were not very good ; and unfortunately, 
with whatever gravity he might paint, his oath 
and his buckskins would never allow me to 
consider him a serious person ; so that it some- 
what surprised me to hear that M. Desenfans 
had bequeathed him his gallery out of pure 
regard ; and still more that Sir Francis, when 
he died, had ordered his own remains to be 
gathered to those of his benefactor and 
Madame Desenfans, and all three buried in 
the society of the pictures they loved. For 
the first time, I began to think that his pictures 
must have contained more than was found in 
them, and that I had done wrong (as it is 
customary to do) to the gaiety of his manners. 



If there was vanity in the bequest, as some 
have thought, it was at least a vanity accom- 
panied with touching circumstances and an 
appearance of a very social taste ; and as most 
people have their vanities, it might be as well 
for them to think what sort of accompaniments 
exalt or degrade theirs, or render them purely 
dull and selfish. As to the Gallery's being 
" out of the way," especially for students, I 
am of a different opinion, and for two reasons : 
first, that no gallery, whether in or out of the 
way, can ever produce great artists, nature, and 
perhaps the very want of a gallery, always 
settling that matter before galleries are thought 
of ; and, second, because in going to see the 
pictures in a beautiful country village, people 
get out of their town common-places, and are 
better prepared for the perception of other 
beauties, and of the nature that makes them 
all. Besides, there is probably something to 
pay on a jaunt of this kind, and yet of a differ- 
ent sort from payments at a door. There is 
no illiberal demand at Dulwich for a liberal 
pleasure ; but then " the inn " is inviting ; 
people eat and drink, and get social ; and the 
warmth which dinner and a glass diffuses, 
helps them to rejoice doubly in the warmth of 
the sunshine and the pictures, and in the fame 
of the great and generous. 

Leaving Dulwich for Norwood (where we 
rejoiced to hear that some of our old friends 
the Gipsies were still extant), we found the air 
very refreshing as we ascended towards the 
church of the latter village. It is one of the 
dandy modern churches (for they deserve no 
better name) standing on an open hill, as if to 
be admired. It is pleasant to see churches 
instead of Methodist chapels, because any 
moderate religion has more of real Christianity 
in it, than contumelious opinions of God and 
the next world ; but there is a want of taste, 
of every sort, in these new churches. They are 
not picturesque, like the old ones ; they are 
not humble ; they are not, what they are so 
often miscalled, classical. A barn is a more 
classical building than a church with a fan- 
tastic steeple to it. In fact, a barn is of the 
genuine classical shape, and only wants a stone 
covering, and pillars about it, to become a 
temple of Theseus. The classical shape is the 
shape of simple utility and beauty. Sometimes 
we see it in the body of the modern church ; 
but then a steeple must be put on it : the 
artist must have something of his own ; and 
having, in fact, nothing of his own, he first puts 
a bit of a steeple, which he thinks will not be 
enough, then another bit, and then another ; 
adds another fantastic ornament here and 
there to his building, by way of rim or " border, 
like j" and so, having put his pepper-box over 
his pillars, and his pillars over his pepper- 
box, he pretends he has done a grand thing, 
while he knows very well that he has only been 
perplexed, and a bricklayer. 



86 



THE COMPANION. 



For a village, the old picturesque church is 
the proper thing, with its tower and its trees, 
as at Hendon and Finchley ; or its spire, as at 
Beckenham. Classical beauty is one thing, 
Gothic or Saxon beauty is another ; quite as 
genuine in its way, and in this instance more 
suitable. It has been well observed, that what 
is called classical architecture, though of older 
date than the Gothic, really does not look so 
old — does not so well convey the sentiment of 
antiquity ; that is to say, the ideal associations 
of this world, however ancient, are far sur- 
passed in the reach of ages by those of religion, 
and the patriarchs and another world ; not to 
mention, that we have been used to identify 
them with the visible old age of 'our parents 
and kindred ; and that Greek and Roman 
architecture, in its smoothness and polish, has 
an unfading look of youth. It might be 
thought, that the erection of new churches on 
the classical principle (taking it for granted 
that, they remind us more of Greek and Roman 
temples, than of their own absurdity) would 

■ be favourable to the growth of liberality ; 

! that, at least, liberality would not be opposed 
by it ; whereas the preservation of the old 
style might tend to keep up old notions. We 
do not think so, except inasmuch as the old 
notions would not be unfavourable to the new. 
New opinions ought to be made to grow as 
kindly as possible out of old ones, and should 
preserve all that they contain of the affec- 
tionate and truly venerable. We could fancy 
the most liberal doctrines preached five hun- 
dred years hence in churches precisely like 
those of our ancestors, and their old dust ready 
to blossom into delight at the arrival of true 
Christianity. But these new, fine, heartless- 
looking, showy churches, neither one thing nor 
the other, have, to our eyes, an appearance of 
nothing but worldliness and a job. 

We descended into Streatham by the lane 
leading to the White Lion; the which noble 
beast, regardant, looked at us up the narrow 
passage, as if intending to dispute rather than 
invite our approach to the castle of his hospi- 
table proprietor. On going nearer, we found 
that the grimness of his aspect was purely in 
our imaginations, the said lordly animal having, 
in fact, a countenance singularly humane, and 
very like a gentleman we knew once of the 
name of Collins. 

It not being within our plan to accept 
Collins's invitation, we turned to the left, and 
proceeded down the village, thinking of Dr. 
Johnson. Seeing, however, an aged landlord 
at the door, we stepped back to ask him if he 
remembered the Doctor. He knew nothing of 
him, nor even of Mr. Thrale, having come late, 
he said, to those parts. Resuming our way, 
we saw, at the end of the village, a decent- 
looking old man, with a sharp eye and a hale 
countenance, who, with an easy, self-satisfied 
air. as if he had worked enough in his time 



and was no longer under the necessity of over- 
troubling himself, sat indolently cracking stones 
in the road. We asked him if he knew Dr. 
Johnson ; and he said, with a jerk-up of his 
eye, " Oh yes ; — / knew him well enough." 
Seating myself on one side of his trench of 
stones, I proceeded to have that matter out 
with Master Whatman (for such was the 
name of my informant). His information did 
not amount to much, but it contained one or 
two points which I do not remember to have 
met with, and every addition to our knowledge 
of such a man is valuable. Nobody will think 
it more so than yourself, who will certainly 
yearn over this part of my letter, and make 
much of it. The following is the sum total of 
what was related : — Johnson, he said, wore a 
silk waistcoat embroidered with silver, and all 
over snuff. The snuff he carried loose in his 
waistcoat pocket, and would take a handful of 
it out with one hand, and help himself to it 
with the other. He would sometimes have his 
dinner brought out to him in the park, and set 
on the ground ; and while he was waiting for 
it, would lie idly, and cut the grass with a 
knife. His manners were very good-natured, 
and sometimes so childish, that people would 
have taken him for " an idiot, like." His voice 
was " low." — " Do you mean low in a gruff 
sense?" — "No: it was rather feminine." — 
" Then perhaps, in one sense of the word, it 
was high ?'' — " Yes, it was." — " And gentle ? " 
— " Yes, very gentle ! " — (This, of course, was 
to people in general, and to the villagers. When 
he dogmatised, it became what Lord Pembroke 
called a "bow-wow." The late Mr. Fuseli 
told us the same thing of Johnson's voice ; we 
mean, that it was ' high,' in contradistinction 
to a bass voice.) To proceed with our village 
historian. Our informant recurred several 
times to the childish manners of Johnson, 
saying that he often appeared " quite simple," 
— " just like a child," — " almost foolish, like." 
When he walked, he always seemed in a hurry. 
His walk was " between a run and a shuffle." 
Master Whatman was here painting a good 
portrait. I have often suspected that the best 
likeness of Johnson was a whole-length en- 
graving of him, walking in Scotland, with that 
joke of his underneath, about the stick that he 
lost in the isle of Mull. Boswell told him the 
stick would be returned. "No, sir," replied 
he ; " consider the value of such apiece of timber 
here." The manner of his walk in the picture 
is precisely that described by the villager. 
Whatman concluded, by giving his opinion of 
Mrs. Thrale, which he did in exactly the fol- 
lowing words : — " She gathered a good deal of 
knowledge from him, but does not seem to 
have turned it to much account." Wherever 
you now go about the country, you recognise 
the effects of that " Twopenny Trash," which 
the illiberal affect to hold in such contempt, 
and are really so afraid of. They have reason • 



A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM. 



87 



for people now canvass their pretensions in 
good set terms, who would have said nothing 
but "Anan!" to a question thirty years back. 
Not that Mr. Whatman discussed politics with 
us. Bet no magnanimous Quarterly Reviewer 
try to get him turned out of a place on that 
score. We are speaking of the peasantry at 
large, and then, not merely of politics, but of 
questions of all sorts interesting to humanity ; 
which the very clowns now discuss by the 
road-side, to an extent at which their former 
leaders would not dare to discuss them. This 
is one reason, among others, why knowledge 
must go on victoriously. A real zeal for the 
truth ca,n discuss anything ; slavery can only 
go the length of its chain. 

In quitting Streatham, we met a lady on 
horseback, accompanied by three curs and a 
footman, which a milkman facetiously termed 
a footman and "three outriders." Entering 
Mitcham by the green where they play at 
cricket, we noticed a pretty, moderate-sized 
house, with the largest geraniums growing on 
each side the door that we ever beheld in that 
situation. Mitcham reminded me of its neigh- 
bour, Merton, and of the days of my childhood ; 
but we could not go out of our way to see it. 
There was the little river Wandle, however, 
turning a mill, and flowing between flowery 
meadows. The mill was that of a copper 
manufactory, at which the people work night 
as well as day, one half taking the duties alter- 
nately. The reason given for this is, that by 
night, the river not being interrupted by other 
demands upon it, works to better advantage. 
The epithet of "flowery" applied to the district, 
is no poetical licence. In the fields about 
Mitcham they cultivate herbs for the apothe- 
caries ; so that in the height of the season, you 
walk as in the Elysian fields, 

" In yellow meads of asphodel. 
And amaranthine bowers." 

Apothecaries' Hall, I understand, is entirely 
supplied with this poetical part of medicine 
from some acres of ground belonging to Major 
Moor. A beautiful bed of poppies, as we 
entered Morden, glowed in the setting sun, 
like the dreams of Titian. It looked like a bed 
for Proserpina — a glow of melancholy beauty, 
containing a joy perhaps beyond joy. Poppies, 
with their dark ruby cups and crowned heads, 
the more than wine colour of their sleepy silk, 
and the funeral look of their anthers, seem to 
have a meaning about them beyond other 
flowers. They look as if they held a mystery 
at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe. 

The church of Mitcham has been rebuilt, if 
I recollect rightly, but in the proper old style. 
Morden has a good old church, which tempted 
us to look into the church-yard ; but a rich 
man who lives near it, and who did not choose 
his house to be approached on that side, had 
locked up the gate, so that there was no path 



through it, except on Sundays. Can this be a 
lawful exercise of power ? If people have a 
right to call any path their own, I should think 
it must be that which leads to the graves of 
their fathers and mothers ; and next to their 
right, such a path is the right of the traveller. 
The traveller may be in some measure regarded 
as a representative of wandering humanity. 
He claims relationship with all whom he finds 
attached to a place in idea. He and the dead 
are at once in a place, and apart from it. 
Setting aside this remoter sentiment, it is 
surely an inconsiderate thing in any man to 
shut up a church-yard from the villagers ; and 
should these pages meet the eye of the person 
in question, he is recommended to think better 
of it. Possibly I may not know the whole of 
the case, and on that account, though not that 
only, I mention no names ; for the inhabitant 
with whom I talked on the subject, and who 
regarded it in the same light, added, with a 
candour becoming his objections, that "the 
gentleman was a very good-natured gentleman, 
too, and kind to the poor." How his act of 
power squares with his kindness, I do not 
know. Very good-natured people are some- 
times very fond of having their own way ; but 
this is a mode of indulging it, which a truly 
generous person, I should think, will, on reflec- 
tion, be glad to give up. Such a man, I am 
sure, can afford to concede a point, where 
others, who do not deserve the character, will 
try hard to retain every little proof of their 
importance. 

On the steps of the George Inn, at Morden, 
the rustic inn of a hamlet, stood a personage 
much grimmer than the White Lion of Strea- 
tham ; looking, in fact, with his fiery eyes, his 
beak, and his old mouth and chin, very like the 
cock, or " grim leoun," of Chaucer. He was 
tall and thin, with a flapped hat over his eyes, 
and appeared as sulky and dissatisfied as if 
he had quarrelled with the whole world, the 
exciseman in particular. We asked him if he 
could let us have some tea. He said, " Yes, 
he believed so ;" and pointed with an indiffer- 
ent, or rather hostile air, to a room at the side, 
which we entered. A buxom good-natured 
girl, with a squint, that was bewitching after 
the moral deformity of our friend's visage, 
served us up tea ; and " tea, sir," as Johnson 
might have said, "inspires placidity." The 
room was adorned with some engravings after 
Smirke, the subjects out of Shakspeare, which 
never look so well, I think, as when thus 
encountered on a journey. Shakspeare is in 
the highway of life, with exquisite side-touches 
of the remoteness of the poet ; and nobody 
links all kindly together as he does. 

We afterwards found in conversing with the 
villager above-mentioned, that our host of the 
George had got rich, and was preparing to quit 
for a new house he had built, in which he meant 
to turn gentleman farmer. Habit made him 



88 



THE COMPANION. 



dislike to go ; pride and his wife (who vowed 
she would go whether he did or not) rendered 
him unable to stay ; and so between his grudg- 
ing the new-comer and the old rib, he was in 
as pretty a state of irritability as any success- 
ful non-succeeder need be. People had been 
galling him all day, I suppose, with showing 
how many pots of ale would be drunk under 
the new tenant ; and our arrival crowned the 
measure of his receipts and his wretchedness, 
by intimating that "gentlefolks" intended to 
come to tea. — Adieu, till next week. 

We left Morden after tea, and proceeded 
on our road for Epsom. The landscape con- 
tinued fiat but luxuriant. You are sure, 
I believe, of trees in Surrey, except on the 
downs ; and they are surrounded with wood, 
and often have beautiful clumps of it. The 
sun began to set a little after we had got be- 
yond the Post-house ; and was the largest I 
remember to have seen. It looked through 
hedges of elms and wild roses ; the mowers 
were going home ; and by degrees the land- 
scape was bathed in a balmy twilight. Patient 
and placid thought succeeded. It was an hour, 
and a scene, in which one would suppose that 
the weariest-laden pilgrim must feel his burden 
easier. 

About a mile from Ewell a post-chaise over- 
took and passed us, the driver of which was 
seated, and had taken up an eleemosynary girl 
to sit with him. Postilions run along a road, 
conscious of a pretty power in that way, and 
able to select some fair one, to whom they gal- 
lantly make a present of a ride. Not having 
a fare of one sort, they make it up to them- 
selves by taking another. You may be 
pretty sure on these occasions, that there is 
nobody " hid in their vacant interlunar" chaise. 
So taking pity on my companions (for after I 
am once tired, I seem as if I could go on, tired 
for ever), I started and ran after the charioteer. 
Some good-natured peasants (they all appear 
such in this county) aided the shouts which I 
sent after him. He stopped; and the gallantry on 
both sides was rewarded by the addition of two 
females to his vehicle. "We were soon through 
Ewell, a pretty neat-looking place with a proper 
old church, and a handsome house opposite, new 
but in the old style. The church has trees by 
it, and there was a moon over them. — At Ewell 
was born the facetious Bishop Corbet, who when 
a bald man was brought before him to be con- 
firmed, said to his assistant," Some dust,Lushing- 
ton : " — (to keep his hand from slipping.) 

The night air struck cold on passing Ewell ; 
and for the first time there was an appearance 
of a bleak and barren country to the left. 
This was Epsom Downs. They are the same 
as the Banstead and Leatherhead downs, the 
name varying with the neighbourhood. You 
remember Banstead mutton ? 

" To Hounslow-heath I point, and Banstead down ; 
Thence comes your mutton, and these chick3 my own." 



Pope seems to have lifted up his delicate nose 
at Twickenham, and scented his dinner a dozen 
miles off. 

At Epsom we supped and slept ; and finding 
the inn comfortable, and having some work to 
do, we stopped there a day or two. Do you 
not like those solid, wainscotted rooms in old 
houses, with seats in the windows, and no pre- 
tension but to comfort ? They please me ex- 
ceedingly. Their merits are complete, if the 
houses are wide and low, and situate in a spot 
at once woody and dry. "Wood is not to be 
expected in a high street ; but the house (the 
King's Head) was of this description ; and Ep- 
som itself is in a nest of trees. Next morning 
on looking out of window, we found ourselves 
in a proper country town, remarkably neat, 
the houses not old enough to be ruinous, nor 
yet to have been exchanged for new ones of 
a London character. Opposite us was the 
watch-house with the market-clock, and a 
pond which is said to contain gold and silver 
fish. How those delicate little creatures came 
to inhabit a pond in the middle of a town I 
cannot say. One fancies they must have been 
put in by the fantastic hand of some fine lady 
in the days of Charles the Second ; for this 
part of the country is eminent in the annals of 
gaiety. Charles used to come to the races here ; 
the palace of Nonesuch, which he gave to Lady 
Castlemain, is a few miles off ; and here he 
visited the gentry in the neighbourhood. At 
Ashted Park, close by, and still in possession of 
inheritors of the name of Howard by marriage, 
he visited Sir Robert Howard, the brother- 
in-law of Dryden, who probably used to come 
there also. They preserved there till not long 
ago the table at which the king dined. 

This Ashted is a lovely spot, — both park and 
village. The village, or rather hamlet, is on 
the road to Leatherhead ; so indeed is the 
park ; but the mansion is out of sight ; and 
near the mansion, and in the very thick of the 
park and the trees, with the deer running about 
it, is the village church, small, old, and pic- 
turesque, — a little stone tower ; and the 
churchyard, of proportionate dimensions, is 
beside it. When I first saw it, looking with 
its pointed windows through the trees, the sur- 
prise was beautiful. The inside disappoints 
you, not because it is so small, but because the 
accommodations and the look of them are so 
homely. The wood of the pews resembles 
that of an old kitchen dresser in colour ; the 
lord of the manor's being not a whit better 
than the rest. This is in good taste, con- 
sidering the rest ; and Col. Howard, who has 
the reputation of being a liberal man, probably 
keeps the church just as he found it, without 
thinking about the matter. At any rate, he 
does not exalt himself, in a Christian assembly, 
at the expense of his neighbours. But loving 
old churches as I do, and looking forward to a 
time when a Christianity still more worthy of 



A WALK FROM DULWIOH TO BROCKHAM. 



80 



the name shall be preached in them, I could 
not help wishing that the inside were more 
worthy of the out. A coat of shining walnut, 
a painting at one end, and a small organ with 
its dark wood and its golden-looking pipes at 
the other, would make, at no great expense to 
a wealthy man, a jewel of an interior, worthy 
of the lovely spot in which the church is situ- 
ate. One cannot help desiring something of 
this kind the more, on account of what has 
been done for other village-churches in the 
neighbourhood, which I shall presently notice. 
Epsom church, I believe, is among them ; the 
outside unquestionably (I have not seen the 
interior) ; and a spire has been added, which 
makes a pretty addition to the scenery. The 
only ornaments of Ashted church, besides two 
or three monuments of the Howards, are the 
family 'scutcheon, and that of his Sacred 
Majesty Charles the Second ; which I suppose 
was put up at the time of his restoration or 
his visit, and has remained ever since, the 
lion still looking lively and threatening. One 
imagines the court coming to church, and the 
whole place filled with perukes and courtiers, 
with love-locks and rustling silks. Sir Robert 
is in a state of exaltation. Dryden stands 
near him, observant. Charles composes his 
face to the sermon, upon which Buckingham 
and Sedley are cracking almost unbearable 
jokes behind their gloves ; and the poor village 
maidens, gaping alternately at his Majesty's 
sacred visage and the profane beauty of the 
Countess of Castlemain, and then losing their 
eyes among " a power " of cavaliers, " the 
handsomest men as ever was," are in a way to 
bring the hearts, thumping in their boddices, 
to a fine market. I wonder how many descend- 
ants there are of earls and marquises living 
this minute at Epsom ! How much noble 
blood ignobly occupied with dairies and 
ploughs, and looking gules in the cheeks of 
bumpkins. 

Ashted Park has some fine walnut-trees 
(Surrey is the great garden of walnuts) and 
one of the noblest limes I ever saw. The park 
is well kept, has a pretty lodge and game- 
keeper's house with roses at the doors ; and a 
farm cottage, where the "gentlefolks" may 
play at rustics. A lady of quality, in a bod- 
dice, gives one somehow a pretty notion ; es- 
pecially if she has a heart high enough really 
to sympathise with humility. A late Earl of 
Exeter lived unknown for some time in a vil- 
lage, under the name of Jones (was not that a 
good name to select ?) and married a country 
girl, whom he took to Burleigh House, and 
then for the first time told her she was the 
mistress of it and a Countess ! This is a ro- 
mance of real life, which has been deservedly 
envied. If I, instead of being a shattered 
student, an old intellectual soldier, " not worth 
a lady's eye," and forced to compose his frame | 
to abide the biddings of his resolution, were J 



a young fellow in the bloom of life, and 
equally clever and penniless, I cannot imagine 
a fortune of which I should be prouder, and 
which would give me a right to take a manlier 
aspect in the eyes of love, than to owe every- 
thing I had in the world, down to my very shoe- 
strings, to a woman who should have played 
over the same story with me, the sexes being 
reversed ; who should say, " You took me for a 
cottager, and I am a Countess ; and this is the 
only deception you will ever have to forgive 
me." What a pleasure to strive after daily 
excellence, in order to show one's gratitude to 
such a woman ; to fight for her ; to suffer for 
her ; to wear her name like a priceless jewel ; 
to hold her hand in long sickness, and look in 
her face when it had lo3t its beauty ; to say, 
questioning, " You know how I love you ? " | 
and for her to answer with such a face of truth, 
that nothing but exceeding health could hinder 
one from being faint with adoring her. Alas ! 
why are not all hearts that are capable of love, 
rich in the knowledge how to show it ; which 
would supersede the necessity of other riches ? 
Or indeed, are not all hearts which are truly so 
capable, gifted with the riches by the capacity l 

Forgive me this dream under the walnut- 
trees of Ashted Park ; and let us return to 
the colder loves of the age of Charles the Se- 
cond. I thought to give you a good picture of 
Epsom, by turning to Shadwell's comedy of 
Epsom Wells ; but it contains nothing of any 
sort except a sketch of a wittol or two, though 
Sedley is said to have helped him in it, and 
though (probably on that account) it was very 
successful. 

Pepys, however, will supply us with a scene 
or two : — 

" 26th, Lord's-day.— Up and to the Wells, 
where a great store of citizens, which was the 
greatest part of the company, though there 
were some others of better quality. Thence 
I walked to Mr. Minnes's house, and thence to 
Durdan's, and walked within the court-yard 
&c. to the bowling-green, where I have seen so 
much mirth in my time ; but now no family in 
it (my Lord Barkeley, whose it is, being with 
his family at London). Then rode through 
Epsom, the whole town over, seeing the vari- j 
ous companies that were there walking ; which ! 
is very pleasant, seeing how they are without j 
knowing what to do, but only in the morning 
to drink waters. Bui Lord ! to see how many 
I met there of citizens, that I could not have 
thought to have seen there ; that they had ever 
had it in their heads or purses to go down 
there. We went through Nonesuch Park to 
the house, and there viewed as much as we 
could of the outside, and looked through the 
great gates, and found a noble court : and 
altogether believe it to have been a very noble 
house, and a delicate parke about it, where 
just now there was a doe killed for the king, 
to carry up to court." — Vol. i. p. 241. 



90 



THE COMPANION. 



If the sign of the King's Head at Epsom is 
still where it used to be, it appears, from an- 
other passage, that we had merry ghosts next 
door to us. 

" 14th. — To Epsom, by eight o'clock, to the 
Well, where much company. And to the 
town, to the King's Head ; and hear that my 
Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the 
next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them; 
and keep a merry house. Poor girl ! I pity 
her; but more the loss of her at the king's 
house. Here Tom Wilson came to me, and 
sat and talked an hour ; and I perceive he hath 
been much acquainted with Dr. Fuller (Tom), 
and Dr. Pierson, and several of the great 
cavalier persons during the late troubles ; and 
I was glad to hear him talk of them, which he 
did very ingenuously, and very much of Dr. 
Fuller's art of memory, which he did tell me 
several instances of. By and bye he parted, 
and I talked with two women that farmed the 
well at £12. per annum, of the lord of the 
manor. Mr. Evelyn, with his lady, and also 
my Lord George Barkeley's lady, and their fine 
daughter, that the king of France liked so well, 
and did dance so rich in jewels before the king, 
at the ball I was at, at our court last winter, 
and also their son, a knight of the Bath, were at 
church this morning. I walked upon the Downs, 
where a flock of sheep was ; the most pleasant 
and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. 
We found a shepherd, and his little boy read- 
ing, free from any houses or sight of people, 
the Bible to him ; and we took notice of his knit 
woollen stockings, of two colours mixed." — Vol. 
ii. p. 92. 

This place was still in high condition at the 
beginning of the next century, as appears from 
Toland's account of it, quoted in the History of 
Epsom, by an Inhabitant. After a " flowery," as 
the writer justly calls it, but perhaps not un- 
deserved account of the pleasures of the place, 
outside as well as in, he says — 

" The two rival bowling-greens are not to be 
forgotten, on which all the company, after di- 
verting themselves, in the morning, according 
to their fancies, make a gallant appearance 
every evening, especially on the Saturday and 
Monday. Here are also raffling-tables, with 
music playing most of the day ; and the nights 
are generally crowned with dancing. All new- 
comers are awakened out of their sleep the 
first morning, by the same music, which goes 
to welcome them to Epsom. 

" You would think yourself in some enchanted 
camp, to see the peasants ride to every house, 
with choicest fruits, herbs, and flowers ; with 
all sorts of tame and. wild fowl, the rarest fish 
and venison ; and with every kind of butcher's 
meat, among which the Banstead Down mutton 
is the most relishing dainty. 

" Thus to see the fresh and artless damsels 
of the plain, either accompanied by their 
amorous swains or aged parents, striking their 



bargains with the nice court and city ladies, 
who, like queens in a tragedy, display all their 
finery on benches before their doors (where 
they hourly censure and are censured) ; and 
to observe how the handsomest of each degree 
equally admire, envy, and cozen one another, 
is to me one of the chief amusements of the 
place. 

" The ladies who are too lazy or stately, but 
especially those who sit up late at cards, have 
their provisions brought to their bedside, where 
they conclude the bargain with the higler ; 
and then (perhaps after a dish of chocolate) 
take another nap until what they have thus 
purchased is prepared for dinner. 

" Within a mile and a half of Epsom, is the 
place, and only the place, where the splendid 
mansion of Nonesuch lately stood. A great 
part of it, however, stood in my own time, and 
I have spoken with those who saw it entire. 

" But not to quit our Downs for any court, 
the great number of gentlemen and ladies that 
take the air every morning and evening on 
horseback, and that range, either singly or in 
separate companies, over every hill and dale, 
is a most entertaining object. 

" But whether you gently wander over my 
favourite meadows, planted on all sides quite 
to Woodcote Seat (in whose long grove I 
oftenest converse with myself) ; or walk fur- 
ther on to Ashted house and park ; or ride still 
farther to Box-hill, that enchanting temple of 
Nature ; or whether you lose yourself in the 
aged yew-groves of Mickleham, or try your 
patience in angling for trout about Leatherhead; 
whether you go to some cricket-match, and 
other sports of contending villagers, or choose 
to breathe your horse at a race, and to follow 
a pack of hounds at the proper season : whether, 
I say, you delight in any one or every of these, 
Epsom is the place you must like before all 
others." 

Congreve has a letter addressed " to Mrs. 
Hunt at Epsom." This was Arabella Hunt, 
the lady to whom he addressed an ode on her 
singing, and with whom he appears to have 
been in love. 

Epsom has still its races ; but the Wells (not 
far from Ashted Park), though retaining their 
property, and giving a name to a medicine, 
have long been out of fashion. Individuals, 
however, I believe, still resort to them. Their 
site is occupied by a farm-house, in which 
lodgings are to be had. Close to Ashted Park 
is that of Woodcote, formerly the residence of 
the notorious Lord Baltimore, the last man of 
quality in England who had a taste for abduc- 
tion. Of late our aspirants after figure and 
fortune seem to have been ambitious of restoring 
the practice from Ireland. It is their mode of 
conducting the business of life. Abduction, 
they think, " must be attended to." 

From Woodcote Green, a pretty sequestered 
spot, between this park and the town, rooks 



A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM. 



91 



are said to have been first taken to the Temple 
Gardens, by Sir "William Northey, secretary to 
Queen Anne. How heightened is the pleasure 
given you by the contemplation of a beautiful 
spot, when you think it has been the means of 
conferring a good elsewhere ! I would rather 
live near a rookery, which had sent out a dozen 
colonies, than have the solitary idea of them 
complete. In solitude you crave after human 
good ; and here a piece of it, however cheap in 
the eyes of the scornful, has been conferred ; 
I for Sir William's colony flourish, it seems, in 
the smoke of London. Rooks always appeared 
to me the clergymen among birds ; grave, 
black-coated, sententious ; with an eye to a 
snug sylvan abode, and plenty of tithes. Their 
clerkly character is now mixed up in my 
imagination with something of the lawyer. 
They aDd the lawyers' " studious bowers," as 
Spenser calls the Temple, appear to suit one 
another. Did you ever notice, by the way, 
what a soft and pleasant sound there is in the 
voices of the young rooks — a sort of kindly 
chuckle, like that of an infant being fed ? 

At Woodcote Green is Durdans, the seat 
mentioned in Pepys as belonging to Lord 
Berkeley, now the residence of Sir Gilbert 
Heathcote, and said to have been built (with 
several other mansions) of the materials of 
Nonesuch, when that palace was pulled down. It 
is one of those solid country houses, wider than 
tall, and of shining brick- work, that retain at 
once a look of age and newness ; promise well 
for domestic comfort ; and suit a good sub- 
stantial garden. In coming upon it suddenly, 
and looking at it through the great iron gates 
and across a round plat of grass and flowers, it 
seems a personification of the solid country 
squire himself, not without elegance, sitting 
under his trees. When I looked at it, and 
thought of the times of Charles II., I could not 
help fancying that it must have belonged to 
the " Dame Durden " of the old glee, who had 
such a loving household. 

There is a beautiful walk from Woodcote 
Green to Ashted, through the park, and then 
(crossing the road) through fields and woody 
lanes to Leatherhead ; but in going, we went 
by the road. As we were leaving Epsom, a 
girl was calling the bees to swarm, with a brass 
pan. Larks accompanied us all the way. The 
fields were full of clover ; there was an air on 
our faces, the days being at once fine and gently 
clouded ; and in passing through a lovely 
country, we were conscious of going to a love- 
lier. 

At Leatherhead begin the first local evidences 
of hill and valley, with which the country is 
now enriched. The modern way of spelling 
the name of this town renders it a misnomer 
and a dishonour, and has been justly resented 
by the antiquarian taste of Mr. Dallaway the 
vicar, who makes it a point, they say, to restore 
the old spelling, Lethered. I believe he sup- 



poses it to come anagrammatically from the 
Saxon name Ethelred ; a thing not at all im- 
probable, transformations of that sort having 
been common in old times. (See the annota- 
tions on Chaucer and Redi.) An Ethelred 
perhaps had a seat at this place. Epsom, for- 
merly written Ebsham and Ebbesham (Fuller 
so writes it), is said to have been named from 
Ebba, a Saxon princess, who had a palace 
there. Ebba, I suppose, is the same as Emma, 
cum gratia Mathews. 

Leatherhead, like all the towns that let 
lodgings during the races, is kept very neat 
and nice ; and though not quite so woody as 
Epsom, is in a beautiful country, and has to 
boast of the river Mole. It has also a more 
venerable church. Mr. Dallaway, like a proper 
antiquary, has refreshed the interior, without 
spoiling it. Over the main pew is preserved, 
together with his helmet, an inscription in old 
English letters, to the memory of " frendly 
Robert Gardner," chief Serjeant of the" Seller" 
in the year 1571. This was in the time of 
Elizabeth. A jovial successor of his is also 
recorded, to wit, " Richard Dalton, Esq., Ser- 
jeant of the Wine Cellar to King Charles II." 
But it is on the memory of the other sex that 
Leatherhead church ought to pride itself. 
Here are buried three sister Beauclercs, daugh- 
ters of Lord Henry Beauclerc, who appear to 
have been three quiet, benevolent old maids, 
who followed one another quietly to the grave, 
and had lived, doubtless, the admiration rather 
than the envy of the village damsels. Here 
also lies Miss Cholmondeley, another old maid, 
but merry withal, and the delight of all that 
knew her, who, by one of those frightful ac- 
cidents that suddenly knock people's souls out, 
and seem more frightful when they cut short 
the career of the good-natured, was killed on 
the spot, at the entrance of this village, by the 
overturning of the Princess Charlotte's coach, 
whom she was accompanying on a visit to 
Norbury Park. A most affectionate epitaph, 
honourable to all parties, and recording her 
special attachment to her married sister, is 
inscribed to her memory by her brother-in- 
law, Sir William Bellingham, I think. But 
above all, " Here lies all that is mortal " (to use 
the words of the tombstone) " of Mrs. Eliza- 
beth Rolfe," of Dover, in Kent, who departed 
this life in the sixty-seventh year of her age, 
and was " interred by her own desire at the side 
of her beloved Cousin, Benefactress, andFriend, 
Lady Catharine Thompson, with whom she 
buried all worldly happiness. This temporary 
separation," continues the epitaph, " no engage- 
ments, no pursuits, could render less bitter to the 
disconsolate Mrs. Rolfe, who from the hour she 
lost her other self knew no pleasures but in the 
hopes she cherished (on which point her eyes 
were ever fixed) of joining her friend in the 
region of unfading Felicity. Blessed with the 
Power and Will to succour the distressed, she 



92 



THE COMPANION. 



exercised both ; and in these exercises only 
found a Ray of Happiness. Let the Ridi- 
culers of Female Friendship read this honest 
Inscription, which disdains to flatter." — A 
record in another part informs us, that Mrs. 
Rolfe gave the parish the interest of £400 
annually in memory of the above, so long as the 
parish preserves the marble that announces 
the gift, and the stone that covers her grave. 
Talking with the parish-clerk, who was other- 
wise a right and seemly parish-clerk, elderly and 
withered, with a proper brown wig, he affected, 
like a man of this world, to speak in disparage- 
ment of the phrase " her other self," which 
somebody had taught him to consider romantic, 
and an exaggeration. This was being a little 
too much of " the earth, earthy." The famous 
parish-clerk of St. Andrews, one of the great 
professors of humanity in the times of the 
Deckars and Shakspeares, would have talked 
in a different strain. There is some more of 
the epitaph, recommencing in a style some- 
what " to seek," and after the meditative Bur- 
leigh fashion, in the Critic ; but this does not 
hinder the rest from being true, or Mrs. Rolfe 
and my lady Thompson from being two genuine 
human beings, and among the salt of the 
earth. There is more friendship and virtue in 
the world than the world has yet got wisdom 
enough to know and be proud of ; and few 
things would please me better than to travel 
all over England, and fetch out the records 
of it. 

I must not omit to mention that Elinor 
Rummyn, illustrious in the tap-room pages of 
" Skelton, Laureate," kept a house in this vil- 
lage ; and that Mr. Dallaway has emblazoned 
the fact, for the benefit of antiquarian travel- 
lers, in the shape of her portrait, with an 
inscription upon it. The house is the Running 
Horse, near the bridge. 

The luxuriance of the country now increases 
at every step towards Dorking, which is five 
miles from Leatherhead. You walk through 
a valley with hills on one side and wood all 
about ; and on your right hand is the Mole, 
running through fields and flowery hedges. 
These hills are the turfy downs of Norbury 
Park, the gate of which you soon arrive at. It 
is modern, but in good retrospective taste, and 
stands out into the road with one of those round 
overhanging turrets, which seem held forth by 
the old hand of hospitality. A little beyond, 
you arrive at the lovely village of Mickleham, 
small, sylvan, and embowered, with a little fat 
church (for the epithet comes involuntarily at 
the sight of it), as short and plump as the fattest 
of its vicars may have been, with a dispro- 
portionate bit of a spire on the top, as if he had 
put on an extinguisher instead of a hat. The 
inside has been renewed in the proper taste 
as though Mr. Dallaway had had a hand in it ; 
and there is an organ, which is more than 
Leatherhead can boast. The organist is the 



son of the parish-clerk ; and when I asked his 
sister, a modest, agreeable-looking girl, who 
showed us the church, whether he could not 
favour us with a voluntary, she told me he was 
making hay! What do you say to that ? -I think 
this is a piece of Germanism for you. Her father 
was a day-labourer, like the son, and had 
become organist before him, out of a natural 
love of music. I had fetched the girl from her 
tea. A decent-looking young man was in the 
room with her ; the door was open, exhibiting 
the homely comforts inside ; a cat slept before 
it, on the cover of the garden well ; and there 
was plenty of herbs and flowers, presenting 
altogether the appearance of a cottage nest. I 
will be bound that their musical refinements 
are a great help to the enjoyment of all this; 
and that a general lift in their tastes, instead 
of serving to dissatisfy the poor, would have a 
reverse effect, by increasing the sum of their 
resources. It would, indeed, not help to blind 
them to whatever they might have reason to 
ask or to complain of. Why should it ? But 
it would refine them there also, and enable 
them to obtain it more happily, through the 
means of the diffusion of knowledge on all 
sides. 

The mansion of Norbury Park, formerly the 
seat of Mr. Locke, who appears to have had a 
deserved reputation for taste in the fine arts 
(his daughter married an Angerstein), is situate 
on a noble elevation upon the right of the vil- 
lage of Mickleham. Between the grounds and 
the road, are glorious slopes and meadows, 
superabundant in wood, and pierced by the 
river Mole. In coming back we turned up a 
path into them, to look at a farm that was to 
be let. It belongs to a gentleman, celebrated 
in the neighbourhood, and we believe else- 
where, for his powers of " conversation ; " but 
this we did not know at the time. He was ab- 
sent, and had left his farm in the hands of his 
steward, to be let for a certain time. The 
house was a cottage, and furnished as becomes 
a cottage ; but one room we thought would 
make a delicious study. Probably it is one ; 
for there were books and an easy-chair in it. 
The window looked upon a close bit of 
lawn, shut in with trees ; and round the walls 
hung a set of prints from Raphael. This looked 
as if the possessor had something to say for 
himself. 

We were now in the bosom of the scenery 
for which this part of the country is celebrated. 
Between Mickleham and Dorking, on the left 
is the famous Box Hill, so called from the 
trees that grow on it. Part of it presents 
great bald pieces of chalk ; but on the side of 
Mickleham it has one truly noble aspect, a 
" verdurous wall," which looks the higher for 
its being precipitous, and from its having some- 
body's house at the foot of it— a white little 
mansion in a world of green. Otherwise, the 
size of this hill disappointed us. The river 



A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM. 



93 



Mole runs at the foot of it. This river, so 
called from taking part of its course under 
ground, does not plunge into the earth at once 
as most people suppose. So at least Dr. Aikin 
informs us, for I did not look into the matter 
myself. He says it loses itself in the ground 
at various points about the neighbourhood, and 
rises again on the road to Leatherhead. I pro- 
test against its being called " sullen," in spite 
of what the poets have been pleased to call it 
for hiding itself. It is a good and gentle stream, 
flowing through luxuriant banks, and clear 
enough where the soil is gravelly. It hides, 
just as the nymph might hide ; and Drayton 
gives it a good character, if I remember. 
Unfortunately I have him not by me. 

The town of Dorking disappointed us, espe- 
cially one of us, who was a good deal there 
when a child, and who found new London-look- 
ing houses started up in the place of old friends. 
The people also appeared not so pleasant as 
their countrymen in general, nor so healthy. 
There are more King's and Duke's Heads in the 
neighbourhood ; signs, which doubtless came 
in with the Restoration. The Leg of Mutton is 
the favourite hieroglyphic about the Downs. 
Dorking is famous for a breed of fowls with 
six toes. I do not know whether they have 
any faculty at counting their grain. We did 
not see Leith Hill, which is the great station 
for a prospect hereabouts, and upon which 
Dennis the critic made a lumbering attempt 
to be lively. You may see it in the two 
volumes of letters belonging to N. He " blun- 
ders round about a meaning," and endeavours 
to act the part of an inspired Cicerone, with 
oratorical " flashes in the pan." One or two of 
his attempts to convey a particular impression 
are very ludicrous. Just as you think you are 
going to catch an idea, they slide off into hope- 
less generality. Such at least is my impression 
from what I remember. I regret that I could 
not meet at Epsom or Leatherhead with a 
Dorking Guide, which has been lately pub- 
lished, and which, I believe, is a work of merit. 
In the town itself I had not time to think of 
it ; otherwise I might have had some better 
information to give you regarding spots in the 
neighbourhood, and persons who have added 
to their interest. 

One of these, however, I know. Turning 
off to the left for Brockham, we had to go 
through Be tch worth Park, formerly the seat 
of Abraham Tucker, one of the most amiable 
and truth-loving of philosophers. Mr. Hazlitt 



made an abridgment of his principal work : 
but original and abridgment are both out of 
print. The latter, I should think, would sell 
now, when the public begin to be tired of the 
eternal jangling and insincerity of criticism, 
and would fain hear what an honest observer 
has to say. It would only require to be well 
advertised, not puffed ; for puffing, thank God, j 
besides being a very unfit announcer of truth, 
has well-nigh cracked its cheeks. 

Betchworth Castle is now in the possession 
of Mr. Barclay the brewer, a descendant, if I 
mistake not, of the famous Barclay of Urie, 
the Apologist of the Quakers. If this gentle- 
man is the same as the one mentioned in Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson, he is by nature as well 
as descent worthy of occupying the abode of 
a wise man. Or if he is not, why shouldn't he 
be worthy after his fashion ? You remember 
the urbane old bookworm, who conversing with 
a young gentleman, more remarkable for gen- 
tility than beauty, and understanding for the 
first time that he had sisters, said, in a trans- 
port of the gratuitous, " Doubtless very charm- 
ing young ladies, sir." I will not take it for 
granted, that all the Barclays are philosophers ; 
but something of a superiority to the vulgar, 
either in talents or the love of them, may be 
more reasonably expected in this kind of 
hereditary rank than the common one. 

With Mr. Tucker and his chesnut groves I 
will conclude, having in fact nothing to say of 
Brockham, except that it was the boundary of 
our walk. Yes ; I have one thing, and a plea- 
sant one ; which is, that I met there by chance, 
with the younger brother of a family whom I 
had known in my childhood, and who are emi- 
nent to this day for a certain mixture of reli- 
gion and joviality, equally uncommon and 
good-hearted. May old and young continue 
not to know which shall live the longest. I do 
not mean religion or joviality ! but both in 
their shape. 

Believe me, dear sir, very truly yours. — Mine 
is not so novel or luxurious a journey as the 
one you treated us with the other day * ; which 
I mention, because one journey always makes 
me long for another • and I hope not many 
years will pass over your head before you give 
us a second Ramble, in which I may see Italy 
once again, and hear with more accomplished 
ears the sound of her music. 



* See " A Ramble among the Musicians in Germany, 
a work full of gusto. 



THE END. 



LONDON: 
URADBCRY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITE* H I ARS. 



THE SEER; 



OR, 



COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED. 



THE SEER; 


OR, 


COMMON- PLACES REFRESHED. 


BY LEIGH HUNT. 


IN TWO PARTS. 


PART I. 


Love adds a precious seeing to the eye. — Shakspbare. 


LONDON: 


EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 


MDCCCXL. 



LONDON : 
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRJARS. 



PREFACE, 



The following Essays have been collected, for the first time, from such of the author's 
periodical writings as it was thought might furnish another publication similar to the 
Indicator. Most of them have been taken from the London Journal ; and the remainder 
from the Liberal, the Monthly Repository, the Tatler and the Round Table. The title, of 
course, is to be understood in its primitive and most simple sense, and not in its por- 
tentous one, as connected with foresight and prophecy ; nor would the author profess, 
intellectually, to see "farther into a mill-stone" than his betters. His motto, which 
thoroughly explains, will also, he trusts, vindicate all which he aspires to show ; which 
is, that the more we look at anything in this beautiful and abundant world, with a desire 
to be pleased with it, the more we shall be rewarded by the loving spirit of the universe, 
with discoveries that await only the desire. 

It will ever be one of the most delightful recollections of the author's life, that the 
periodical work, from which the collection has been chiefly made, was encouraged by all 
parties in the spirit in which it was set up. Nor, at the hazard of some imputation on his 
modesty, (which he must be allowed not very terribly to care for, where so much love is 
going forward,) can he help repeating what he wrote, on this point, when his heart was 
first touched by it : — 

" As there is nothing in the world which is not supernatural in one sense, — as the very 
world of fashion itself rolls round with the stars, and is a part of the mystery and the 
variety of the shows of the universe, — so nothing, in a contemptuous sense, is small, or 
unworthy of a grave and calm hope, which tends to popularise Christian refinement, and 
to mix it up with every species of social intercourse, as a good realised, and not merely as 
an abstraction preached. What ! Have not Philosophy and Christianity long since met 
in the embrace of such loving discoveries ? And do not the least and most trivial things, 
provided they have an earnest and cheerful good-will, partake of some right of greatness, 
and the privilege to be honoured ; if not with admiration of their wisdom, yet with 
acknowledgment of the joy which is the end of wisdom, and which it is the privilege of 
a loving sincerity to reach by a short road ? Hence we have had two objections, and two 
hundred encouragements ; and excellent writers of all sorts, and of all other shades of 
belief, have hastened to say to us, * Preach that, and prosper.' Have not the Times, and 
the Examiner, and the Atlas, and the Albion, and the True Sun, and twenty other news- 



PREFACE. 



papers, hailed us for the very sunniness of our religion ? Does not that old and judicious 
Whig, the Scotsman, waive his deliberate manner in our favour, and 'cordially' wish us 
success for it ? Does not the Radical Glasgow Argus, in an eloquent article, ' fresh and 
glowing' as his good- will, expressly recommend us for its pervading all we write upon, 
tears included 1 And the rich-writing Tory, Christopher North, instead of objecting to 
the entireness of our sunshine, and requiring a cloud in it, does he not welcome it, aye, 
every week, as it strikes on his breakfast-cloth, and speak of it in a burst of bright- 
heartedness, as ' dazzling the snow V " 

And so, with thanks and blessings upon the warm-hearted of all parties, who love their 
fellow-creatures quite as much as we do, perhaps better, and who may think, for that very 
reason, that the edge of their contest with one another is still not to be so much softened 
as we suppose, here is another bit of a corner, at all events, where, as in the recesses of 
their own minds, all green and hopeful thoughts for the good and entertainment of men 
may lovingly meet. 

[Given at our suburban abode, with a fire on one side of us, and a 
vine at the window on the other, this 19th day of October, one 
thousand eight hundred and forty, and in the very green and 
invincible year of our life, the fifty-sixth.] 

L. H. 



CONTENTS, 



i. 

ii. 
m. 

IV. 

v. 

VI. 

vn. 
vm. 

IX. 

x. 

XL 
XII. 
XIII. 
XIV. 

XV. 
XVI. 

xvn. 
xvm. 

XIX. 

xx. 

XXI. 

XXII. 



PLEASURE . 
ON A PEBBLE 
SPRING 
COLOUR . 



PAGE 
. 1 



WINDOWS 8 

WINDOWS CONSIDERED FROM INSIDE . . . II 

A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW. NAMES OF FLOWERS. MYSTERY OF 

THEIR BEAUTY ,14 

A WORD ON EARLY RISING 17 

BREAKFAST IN SUMMER 18 

BREAKFAST CONTINUED.— TEA-DRINKING 22 

BREAKFAST CONCLUDED— TEA AND COFFEE, MDLK, BREAD, &c. . .25 

ANACREON 28 

THE WRONG SIDES OF SCHOLARSHIP AND NO SCHOLARSHIP . .32 

CRICKET, AND EXERCISE IN GENERAL 34 

A DUSTY DAY , 36 

BRICKLAYERS, AND AN OLD BOOK 37 

A RAINY DAY 40 

THE EAST-WIND 42 

STRAWBERRIES 44 

THE WAITER 45 

" THE BUTCHER."— BUTCHERS AND JURIES.— BUTLER'S DEFENCE OF THE 

ENGLISH DRAMA, &c 47 

A PINCH OF SNUFF 48 



viii CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

XXIII. A PINCH OF SNUFF (concluded) 50 

XXIV. WORDSWORTH AND MILTON 53 

XXV. SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER.— No. 1 55 

XXVI. No. II ■ . . . 57 

XXVII. No. III.— HIS PATHOS 59 

XXVIII. . No. IV.— STORY OF GRISELDA 60 

XXIX. No. V.— FURTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PLEA-, 

SANTRY AND SATIRE . . . .63 

XXX. , No. VI.— MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS 

DESCRIPTION, PORTRAIT-PAINTING, AND FINE SENSE . . . . 64 

XXXI. PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN 66 

XXXII. ENGLISH AND FRENCH FEMALES . . . 71 

XXXIH. ENGLISH MALE COSTUME 75 

XXXIV. ENGLISH WOMEN VINDICATED 77 

XXXV. SUNDAY IN LONDON.— No. 1 79 

XXXVI. No. II 82 

XXXVII. SUNDAY IN THE SUBURBS, &c. . 8 3 

XXXVIII. A HUMAN BEING AND A CROWD 85 



THE SEER 



COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED 



" Love adds a precious seeing to the eye."— Shakspeare. 



I—PLEASURE. 

POOR RICH MEN AND RICH POOR MEN. A WORD OR TWO 
ON THE PERIODICAL WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR. 

Pleasure is the business of this book : we 
own it : we love to begin it with the word : it 
is like commencing the day (as we are now 
commencing it) with sunshine in the room. 
Pleasure for all who can receive pleasure ; con- 
solation and encouragement for the rest ; this 
is our device. But then it is pleasure like that 
implied by our simile, innocent, kindly, we 
dare to add, instructive and elevating. Nor shall 
the gravest aspects of it be wanting. As the 
sunshine floods the sky and the ocean, and yet 
nurses the baby buds of the roses on the wall, 
so we would fain open the largest and the very 
least sources of pleasure, the noblest that ex- 
pands above us into the heavens, and the most 
familiar that catches our glance in the home- 
stead. We would break open the surfaces of 
habit and indifference, of objects that are sup- 
posed to contain nothing but so much brute 
matter, or common-place utility, and show 
what treasures they conceal. Man has not yet 
learned to enjoy the world he lives in ; no, not 
the hundred-thousand-millionth part of it ; and 
we would fain help him to render it productive 
of still greater joy, and to delight or comfort 
himself in his task as he proceeds. We would 
make adversity hopeful, prosperity sympa- 
thetic, all kinder, richer, and happier. And 
we have some right to assist in the endeavour, 
for there is scarcely a single joy or sorrow 
within the experience of our fellow-creatures 
which we have not tasted ; and the belief in 
the good and beautiful has never forsaken us. 
It has been medicine to us in sickness, riches 
in poverty, and the best part of all that ever 
delighted us in health and success. 



There is not a man living perhaps in the 
present state of society, — certainly not among 
those who have a surfeit of goods, any more 
than those who want a sufficiency, — that has 
not some pain which he would diminish, and 
some pleasure, or capability of it, that he would 
increase. We would say to him, let him be 
sure he can diminish that pain and increase 
that pleasure. He will find out the secret, by 
knowing more, and by knowing that there is 
more to love. " Pleasures lie about our feet." 
We would extract some for the unthinking 
rich man out of his very carpet (though he 
thinks he has already got as much as it can 
yield) ; and for the unthinking or unhoping 
poor one, out of his bare floor. 

" Can you put a loaf on my table V the poor 
man may ask. No : but we can show him how 
to get it in the best manner, and comfort him- 
self while he is getting it. If he can get it not 
at all, we do not profess to have even the right 
of being listened to by him. We can only clo 
what we can, as his fellow-creatures, and by 
other means, towards hastening the termination 
of so frightful an exception to the common lot. 

" Can you rid me of my gout, or my disrelish 
of all things ?" the rich man may ask. No : 
nor perhaps even diminish it, unless you are a 
very daring or a very sensible man ; and if 
you are very rich indeed, and old, neither of, these 
predicaments is very likely. Yet we would try. 
We are inextinguishable friends of endeavour. 

If you had the gout, however, and were Lord 
Holland, you would smile and say, " Talk on." 
You would suspend the book, or the pen, or 
the kindly thought you were engaged in, and 
indulgently wait to see what recipes or amusing 
fancies we could add to your stock. 

Nay, if you were a kind of starving Dr. 
Johnson, who wrote a letter one day to the editor 



PLEASURE. 



of the magazine to which he contributed, signing 
himself, " Dinnerless*," you would listen to us 
even without a loaf on your table, and see how 
far we could bear out the reputation of the 
Lydians, who are said to have invented play as 
a resource against hunger. But Dr. Johnson 
knew he had bis remedy in his wits. The 
wants of the poor in knowledge are not so 
easily postponed. "With deep reverence and 
sympathy would we be understood as speaking 
of them. A smile, however closely it may ' 
border upon a grave thought, is not to be held 
a levity in us, any more than sun betwixt rain. 
One and the same sympathy with all things 
fetches it out. 

But to all but the famished we should say 
with the noble text, " Man does not live by 
bread alone." " A man," says Bacon, in words 
not unworthy to go by the side of the others, 
" is but what he knoweth." " I think," said 
Descartes ; " therefore I am." A man has no 
proof of his existence but in his consciousness 
of it, and the return of that consciousness after 
sleep. He is therefore, in amount of existence, 
only so much as his consciousness, his thoughts, 
and his feelings amount to. The more he knows, 
the more he exists ; and the pleasanter his 
knowledge, the happier his existence. One 
man, in this sense of things, and it is a sense 
proved beyond a doubt (except with those merry 
philosophers of antiquity who doubted their 
very consciousness, nay, doubted doubt itself), 
is infinitely little compared withanotherman. If 
we could see his mind, we should see a pigmy ; 
and it would be stuck perhaps into a pint of 
beer, or a scent^bottle, or a bottle of wine ; as 
the monkey stuck Gulliver into the marrow- 
bone. Another man's mind would show larger ; 
another larger still : till at length we should 
see minds of all shapes and sizes, from a mi- 
croscopic one up to that of a giant or a demigod, 
or a spirit that filled the visible world. Milton's 
would be like that of his own archangel. " His 
stature reached the sky." Shakspeare's would 
stretch from the midst of us into the regions of 
"airy nothing," andbringusnew creatures of his 
ownmaking. Bacon'swouldbelostintothenext 
ages. Many a " great man's " would become 
invisible ; and many a little one suddenly asto- 
nish us with the overshadowing of its greatness. 

Men sometimes, by the magic of their know- 
ledge, partake of a great many things which 
they do not possess : others possess much 
which is lost upon them. It is recorded of an 
exquisite, in one of the admirable exhibitions of 
Mr. Mathews, that being told, with a grave 
face, of a mine of silver which had been dis- 
covered in one of the London suburbs, he 
exclaimed, in his jargon, " A mine of sil-vau ! 
Good Gaud ! You don't tell me so ! A mine of 

* Impransus. It might mean simply, that he had not 
dined ; but there is too much reason to believe otherwise. 
And yet how much good and entertainment did not the 
very necessities of such a man help to produce us. 



sil-vau ! Good Gaud ! I've often seen the little 
boys playing about, but I had no idea that there 
was a mine of sil-vau." 

This gentleman, whom we are to understand 
as repeating these words out of pure ignorance 
and absurdity, and not from any power to 
receive information, would be in possession, 
while he was expressing his astonishment at a 
thing unheard of and ridiculous, of a hundred 
real things round about him, of which he knew 
nothing. Shakspeare speaks of a man who was 
" incapable of his own distress ;" that is to say, 
who had not the feelings of other men, and 
was insensible to what would have distressed 
everybody else. This dandy would be inca- 
pable of his own wealth, of his own furniture, 
of his own health, friends, books, gardens ; nay 
of his very hat and coat, except inasmuch as 
they contributed to give him one single idea ; 
to wit, that of his dandyism. From all those 
stores, small and great, nothing but that soli- 
tary and sorry impression would he receive. 

Of all which his wealth could procure him, in 
the shape of a real enjoyment of poetry, pain ting, 
music, sculpture, and the million of ideas which 
they might produce, he would knoAv nothing. 

Of all the countries that produced his furni- 
ture, all the trades that helped to make it, all 
the arts that went to adorn it, all the materials 
of which it was composed, and the innumerable 
images of men, lands, faculties, substances, 
elements, and interesting phenomena of all 
sorts to which the knowledge might give rise, 
he would know nothing. 

Of his books he would know nothing, except 
that they were bound, and that they caust a 
great deal. 

Of his gardens he would know nothing, 
except that they were " tedious," and that he 
occasionally had a pink out of them to put in 
his button-hole — provided it was the fashion. 
Otherwise pinks are " vulgar." Nature's and 
God's fashion is nothing. 

Of his hat and his coat it might be thought 
he must know something ; but he would not, 
except as far as we have stated ; — unless, 
indeed, his faculties might possibly attain to 
the knowledge of a " fit " or a " set," and then 
he would not know it with a grace. The 
knowledge of a good thing, even in the least 
matters, is not for a person so poorly educated 
— so worse than left to grow up in an ignorance 
unsophisticate. Of the creatures that furnished 
the materials of his hat and coat, — the curious 
handicraft beaver, the spinster silkworm, the 
sheep in the meadows (except as mutton), 
nothing would he know, or care, or receive the 
least pleasurable thought from. In the mind 
that constitutes his man — in the amount of his 
existence — terribly vacant are the regions — 
bald places in the map— deserts without even 
the excitement of a storm. Nothing lives there 
but himself— a suit of clothes in a solitude — 
emptiness in emptiness. 



PLEASURE. 



3 



CoDtrast a being of this fashion (after all 
allowance for caricature) with one who has 
none of his deformities, but with a stock of 
ideas such as the other wants. Suppose him 
poor, even struggling, but not unhappy ; or if 
not without unhappiness, yet not without relief, 
and unacquainted with the desperation of the 
other's ennui. Such a man, when he wants 
recreation for his thoughts, can make them flow 
from all the objects, or the ideas of those 
objects, which furnish nothing to the other. 
The commonest goods and chattels are preg- 
nant to him as fairy tales, or things in a panto- 
mime. His hat, like Fortunatus's Wishing 
Cap, carries him into the American solitudes 
among the beavers, where he sits in thought, 
looking at them during their work, and hearing 
the majestic whispers in the trees, or the falls 
of the old trunks that are repeatedly break- 
ing the silence in those wildernesses. His coat 
I shall carry him, in ten minutes, through all the 
scenes of pastoral life and mechanical, the 
quiet fields, the sheep-shearing, the feasting, 
the love-making, the downs of Dorsetshire and 
the streets of Birmingham, where if he meet 
with pain in his sympathy, he also, in his 
knowledge, finds reason for hope and encou- 
ragement, and for giving his manly assistance 
to the common good. The very toothpick of 
the dandy, should this man, or any man like 
him meet with it, poor or rich, shall suggest 
to him, if he pleases, a hundred agreeable 
thoughts of foreign lands, and elegance and 
amusement, — of tortoises and books of travels, 
and the comb in his mistress's hair, and the 
elephants that carry sultans, and the real silver 
mines of Potosi, with all the wonders of South 
American history, and the starry cross in its 
sky ; so that the smallest key shall pick the 
lock of the greatest treasures ; and that which 
in the hands of the possessor was only a poor 
instrument of affectation, and the very emblem 
of indifference and stupidity, shall open to the 
knowing man a universe. 

We must not pursue the subject further at 
present, or trust our eyes at the smallest objects 
around us, which, from long and loving con- 
templation, have enabled us to report their 
riches. We have been at this work now, off 
and on, man and boy, (for we began essay- 
writing while in our teens,) for upwards of 
thirty years : and excepting that, we would 
fain have done far more, and that experience 
and suffering have long restored to us the 
natural kindliness of boyhood, and put an end 
to a belief in the right or utility of severer 
views of anything or person, we feel the same 
as we have done throughout ; and we have the 
same hope, the same love, the same faith in the 
beauty and goodness of nature and all her 
prospects, in space and in time ; we could 
almost add, if a sprinkle of white hairs in our 
black would allow us, the same youth ; for 
whatever may be thought of a consciousness 



to that effect, the feeling is so real, and trouble 
of no ordinary kind has so remarkably spared 
the elasticity of our spirits, that we are often 
startled to think how old we have become, 
compared with the little of age that is in our 
disposition : and we mention this to bespeak 
the reader's faith in what we shall write here- 
after, if he is not acquainted with us already. 
If he is, he will no more doubt us than the 
children do at our fire-side. We have had so 
much sorrow, and yet are capable of so much 
joy, and receive pleasure from so many familiar 
objects, that we sometimes think we should 
have had an unfair portion of happiness, if 
our life had not been one of more than ordinary 
trial. 

The reader will not be troubled in future 
with personal intimations of this kind ; but in 
commencing a new work of the present nature 
and having been persuaded to put our name at 
the top of it, (for which we beg his kindest 
constructions, as a point conceded by a sense 
of what was best for others,) it will be thought, 
we trust, not unfitting in us to have alluded to 
them. We believe we may call ourselves the 
father of the present penny and three-half- 
penny literature, — designations, once distress- 
ing to " ears polite," but now no longer so, 
since they are producing so many valuable 
results, fortunes included. The first number 
of the new popular review, the Printing Machine, 
in an article for the kindness and cordiality of 
which we take this our best opportunity of ex- 
pressing our gratitude, and can only wish we 
could turn these sentences into so many grips 
of the hand to show our sense of it, — did us 
the honour of noticing the Indicator as the first 
successful attempt (in one respect) to revive 
something like the periodical literature of 
former days. We followed this with the Com- 
panion, lately republished in connexion with the 
Indicator ; and a few years ago, in a fit of anx- 
iety at not being able to meet some obligations, 
and fearing we were going to be cut off from 
life itself without leaving answers to still 
graver wants, we set up a half-reviewing, half- 
theatrical periodical, under the name of the 
Toiler, (a liberty taken by love,) in the hope 
of being able to realise some sudden as well as 
lasting profits ! So little, with all our zeal for 
the public welfare, had we found out what was 
so well discerned by Mr. Knight and others, 
when they responded to the intellectual wants 
of the many. However, we pleased some 
readers, whom it is a kind of prosperity even to 
rank as such ; we conciliated the good-will of 
others, by showing that an ardent politician 
might still be a man of no ill-temper, nor with- 
out good- will to all ; and now, once more setting 
up a periodical work, entirely without politics, 
but better calculated, we trust, than our former 
ones to meet the wishes of many as well as 
few, we are in hearty good earnest, the public's 
very sincere and cordial friend and servant. 



ON A PEBBLE. 



II.— ON A PEBBLE. 

Looking about vis during a walk to see what 
subject we could write upon in this our second 
number, that should be familiar to everybody, 
and afford as striking a specimen as we could 
give, of the entertainment to be found in the 
commonest objects, our eyes lighted upon a 
stone. It was a common pebble, a flint ; such 
as a little boy kicks before him as he goes, by 
way of making haste with a message, and saving 
his new shoes. 

" A stone !" cries a reader, " a flint ! the very 
symbol of a miser ! what can be got out of 
that ?" 

The question is well put ; but a little reflec- 
tion on the part of our interrogator would soon 
rescue the poor stone from the comparison. 
Strike him at any rate, and you will get some- 
thing out of him : — warm his heart, and out 
come the genial sparks that shall gladden your 
hearth, and put hot dishes on your table. This 
is not miser's work. A French poet has de- 
scribed the process, well known to the maid- 
servant (till luciferscame up) when she stooped, 
with flashing face, over the tinder-box on a 
cold morning, and rejoiced to see the first laugh 
of the fire. A sexton, in the poem we allude 
to, is striking a light in a church : — 

Boirude, qui voit que le peril approche, 

Les arrete, et tirant un fusil de sa poche, 

Des veines d'un caillou, qu'il frappe au merae instant, 

II fait jaillir un feu qui petille en sortant ; 

Et bientot au brasier d'unemeche enflammee, 

Montre, a l'aide du souff re, une cire allumm^e. 

Boileau. 

The prudent Sexton, studious to reveal 
Dark holes, here takes from out his pouch a steel ; 
Then strikes upon a flint. In many a spark 
Forth leaps the sprightly fire against the dark ; 
The tinder feels the little lightning hit, 
The match provokes it, and a candle's lit. 

We shall not stop to pursue this fiery point 
into all its consequences ; to show what a world 
of beauty or of formidable power is contained in 
that single property of our friend flint ; what 
fires, what lights, what conflagrations, what 
myriads of clicks of triggers —awful sounds 
before battle, when instead of letting his flint 
do its proper good-natured work of cooking his 
supper, and warming his wife and himself over 
their cottage-fire, the poor fellow is made to 
kill and be killed by other poor fellows, whose 
brains are strewed about the place for want of 
knowing better. 

But to return to the natural, quiet condition 
of our friend, and what he can do for us in a 
peaceful way, and so as to please meditation ; — 
what think you of him as the musician of the 
brooks ? as the unpretending player on those 
watery pipes and flageolets, during the hot 
noon, or the silence of the night ? "Without the 
pebble the brook would want its prettiest 



murmur. And then, in reminding you of these 
murmurs, he reminds you of the poets. 

A noise as of a hidden brook 

In the leafy month of June, 
That to the sleeping woods all night 

Singeth a quiet tune. — Coleridge. 

Yes, the brook singeth ; but it would not sing so 
well, — it would not have that tone and ring in 
its music, without the stone. 

Then 'gan the shepherd gather into one 

His straggling goats, and drove them to a ford, 

Whose ccerule stream, rumbling in pebble-stone*, 
Crept under moss as green as any gourd. 

Spenser's Gnat. 

Spenser's Gnat, observe ; he wrote a whole 
poem upon a gnat, and a most beautiful one 
too, founded upon another poem on the same 
subject written by the great Roman poet Virgil, 
not because these great poets wanted or were 
unequal to great subjects, such as all the world 
think great, but because they thought no care, 
and no fetching out of beauty and wonder, ill 
bestowed upon the smallest marvellous object 
of God's workmanship. The gnat, in their 
poems, is the creature that he really is, full of 
elegance and vivacity, airy, trumpeted, and 
plumed, and dancing in the sunbeams, — not the 
contempt of some thoughtless understanding, 
which sees in it nothing but an insect coming 
to vex its skin. The eye of the poet, or other 
informed man, is at once telescope and micro- 
scope, able to traverse the great heavens, and 
to do justice to the least thing they have created. 
But to our brook and pebbles. See how one 
pleasant thing reminds people of another. A 
pebble reminded us of the brooks, and the 
brooks of the poets, and the poets reminded us 
of the beauty and comprehensiveness of their 
words, whether belonging to the subject in hand 
or not. No true poet makes use of a word for 
nothing. " Ccerule stream," says Spenser ; but 
why ccerule, which comes from the Latin, and 
seems a pedantic word, especially as it signifies 
blue, which he might have had in English ? The 
reason is, not only that it means shy-blue, and 
therefore shows us how blue the sky was at the 
time, and the cause why the brook was of such 
a colour (for if he had wanted a word to express 
nothing but that circumstance, he might have 
said sky-blue at once, however quaint it might 
have sounded to modern ears : — he would have 
cared nothing for that ; it was his business to do 
justice to nature, and leave modern ears, as 
they grew poetical, to find it out) ; but the 
word ccerule was also a beautiful word, beautiful 
for the sound, and expressive of a certain 
liquid yet neat softness, somewhat resembling 
the mixture of soft hissing, rumbling, and in- 
ward music of the brook. — We beg the reader's 

* " Rumbling in pebble-stone" is a pretty enlargement of 
Virgil's " susurrantis " (whispering). Green as any gourd 
is also an improvement as well as an addition. The ex- 
pression is as fresh as the colour. 



ON A PEBBLE. 



indulgence for thus stopping him by the way, 
to dwell on the beauty of a word ; but poets' 
words are miniature creations, as curious, after 
their degree, as the insects and the brooks 
themselves ; and when companions find them- 
selves in pleasant spots, it is natural to wander 
both in feet and talk. 

So much for the agreeable sounds of which 
the sight of a common stone may remind us (for 
we have not chosen to go so far back as the 
poetry of Orpheus, who is said to have made 
the materials of stone-walls answer to his lyre, 
and dance themselves into shape without 
troubling the mason). Weshall come to grander 
echoes by-and-by. Let us see, meanwhile, 
how pleasant the sight itself may be rendered. 
Mr. Wordsworth shall do it for us in his ex- 
quisite little poem on the fair maiden who died 
by the river Dove. Our volume is not at hand, 
but we remember the passage we more par- 
ticularly allude to. It is where he compares 
his modest, artless, and sequestered beauty with 

A violet by a mossy stone 

Half hidden from the eye ; 
Fair as the star, when only one 

Is shining in the sky. 

Is not that beautiful ? Can anything express 
a lovelier loneliness, than the violent half hid- 
den by the mossy stone — the delicate blue-eyed 
flower against the country green I And then 
the loving imagination of this fine poet, exalt- 
ing the object of his earthly worship to her 
divine birth-place and future abode, suddenly 
raises his eyes to the firmament, and sees her 
there, the solitary star of his heaven. 

But stone does not want even moss to ren- 
der him interesting. Here is another stone, 
and another solitary evening star, as beautifully 
introduced as the others, but for a different 
purpose. It is in the opening words of Mr. 
Keats's poem of Hyperion, where he describes 
the dethroned monarch of the gods, sitting in 
his exile : — 

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, 
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve's one star, 
Sate grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone. 

Quiet as a stone ! Nothing certainly can be 
more quiet than that. Not a syllable or a sigh 
will a stone utter, though you watch and bear 
him company for a whole week on the most 
desolate moor in Cumberland. Thus silent, 
thus unmoved, thus insensible to whatever 
circumstances might be taking place, or spec- 
tators might think of him, was the soul-stunned 
old patriarch of the gods. We may picture to 
ourselves a large, or a small stone, as we please 
— Stone-henge,or a pebble. The simplicity and 
grandeur of truth do not care which. Thesilence 
is the thing, — its intensity, its unalterableness. 
Our friend Pebble is here in grand company, 
and you may think him (though we hope not) 
unduly bettered by it. But see what Shak- 



speare will do for him in his hardest shape and 
in no finer company than a peasant's : — 

Weariness 
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth 
Finds the down pillow hard. 

Sleeping on hard stone would have been 
words strong enough for a common poet ; or 
perhaps he would have said, " resting," or " pro- 
foundly reposing ;" or that he could have made 
his " bed of the bare floor ;" and the last saying 
would not have been the worst ; but Shakspeare 
must have the very strongest words and really 
profoundest expressions, and he finds them in 
the homeliest and most primitive. He does not 
mince the matter, but goes to the root of both 
sleep and stone — can snore upon the flint. We 
see the fellow hard at it — bent upon it — deeply 
drinking of the forgetful draught. 

To conclude our quotations from the poets, 
we will give another line or two from Shak- 
speare, not inapplicable to our proposed specu- 
lations in general, and still less so to the one 
in hand. 

Green, a minor poet, author of the "Spleen," 
an effusion full of wit and good sense, gives 
pleasant advice to the sick who want exercise, 
and who are frightened with hypochondria : 

Fling but a stone, the giant dies. 

And this reminds us of a pleasant story con- 
nected with the flinging of stones, in one of the 
Italian novels. Two waggish painters persuade 
a simple brother of theirs, that there is a plant 
which renders the finder of it invisible, and 
they all set out to look for it. They pretend 
suddenly to miss him, as if he had gone away ; 
and to his great joy, while throwing stones 
about in his absence, give him great knocks in 
the ribs,and horrible bruises, he hugging himself 
all the while at these manifest proofs of his 
success, and the little suspicion which they 
have of it. It is amusing to picture him to 
one's fancy, growing happier as the blows grow 
worse, rubbing his sore knuckles with delight, 
and hardly able to ejaculate a triumphant Hah ! 
at some excessive thump in the back. 

But setting aside the wonders of the poets 
and the novelists, Pebble, in his own person 
and by his own family alliances, includes 
wonders far beyond the most wonderful things 
they have imagined. Wrongly is Flint com- 
pared with the miser. You cannot, to be sure, 
skin him, but you can melt him ; ay, make him 
absolutely flow into a liquid ; — flow too for use 
and beauty ; and become light unto your eyes 
goblets to your table, and a mirror to your be- 
loved. Bring two friends of his about him, 
called Potash and Soda, and Flint runs into 
melting tenderness, and is no longer Flint ; he 
is Glass. You look through him ; you drink 
out of him ; he furnishes you beautiful and 
transparent shutters against the rain and cold ; 
you shave by him ; protect pictures with him, 



SPRING. 



and watches, and books ; are assisted by him 
in a thousand curious philosophies ; are helped 
over the sea by him ; and he makes your cathe- 
dral windows divine; and enables your mistress 
to wear your portrait in her bosom. 

But we must hasten to close our article, and 
bring his most precious riches down in a shower 
surpassing the rainbow. Stone is the humble 
relation, nay, the stock and parent of Precious 
Stone ! Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire, are of his 
family ! of the family of the Flints — and Flint 
is more in them than anything else ! That the 
habitations and secret bosoms of the precious 
metals are stone, is also true ; but it is little 
compared with this. Precious stone, for the 
most part, is stone itself — is flint — with some 
wonderful circumstance of addition, nobody 
knows what ; but without the flint, the pre- 
ciousness would not be. Here is wealth and 
honour for the poor Pebble ! Look at him, and 
think what splendours issue from his loins : 

Fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price, 
As one of them, indifferently rated, 
Might serve in peril of calamity, 
To ransom great kings from captivity. 

Marlowe. 

"Sparkling diamonds" are not properly in 
our list of pebbles ; for diamond, the most 
brilliant mystery of all, is a charcoal I 

What now remains for stone, thus filling the 
coffers of wealth, glorifying the crowns of 
sultans, and adding beams to beauty itself? 
One thing greater than all. The oldest and 
stoniest of stone is granite, and granite (as far 
as we know) is the chief material of the earth 
itself — the bones of the world — the substance 
of our star. 

Honoured therefore be thou, thou small 
pebble lying in the lane ; and whenever any 
one looks at thee, may he think of the beau- 
tiful and noble world he lives in, and all of 
which it is capable. 



III.— SPRING. 

This morning as we sat at breakfast, think- 
ing of our present subject, with our eyes fixed 
on a set of the British Poets, which stand us 
in stead of a prospect, there came by the 
window, from a child's voice, a cry of " Wall- 
flowers." There had just been a shower ; 
sunshine had followed it ; and the rain, the 
sun, the boy's voice, and the flowers, came all 
so prettily together upon the subject we were 
thinking of, that in taking one of his roots, we 
could not help fancying we had received a 
present from Nature herself, — with a penny 
for the bearer. There were thirty lumps of 
buds on this penny root ; their beauty was yet 
to come ; but the promise was there, — the new 



life, — the Spring, — and the rain-drops were on 
them, as if the sweet goddess had dipped her 
hand in some fountain, and sprinkled them for 
us by way of message ; as who should say, 
" April and I are coming." 

What a beautiful word is Sptring! At least 
one fancies so, knowing the meaning of it, and 
being used to identify it with so many pleasant 
things. An Italian might find it harsh ; and 
object to the Sp and the terminating consonant ; 
but if he were a proper Italian, a man of fancy, 
the worthy countryman of Petrarch and Ariosto, 
we would convince him that the word was an 
excellent good word, crammed as full of beauty 
as a bud, — and that S had the whistling of the 
brooks in it, p and r the force and roughness 
of whatsoever is animated and picturesque, ing 
the singing of the birds, and the whole word 
the suddenness and salience of all that is lively, 
sprouting, and new — Spring, Spring-time, a 
Spring-green, a Spring of water — to Spring — 
Springal, a word for a young man, in old (that 
is, ever new) English poetry, which with many 
other words has gone out, because the youthful- 
ness of our hearts has gone out, — to come back 
with better times, and the nine-hundredth 
number of the work before us. 

If our Italian, being very unlike an Italian, 
ill-natured and not open to pleasant conviction, 
should still object to our word, we would grow 
uncourteous in turn, and swear it was a better 
word than his Prima-vera, — which is what he 
calls Spring — Prima-vera, that is to say, the 
first Vera, or Ver of the Latins, the Veer (firjp 
Ionice) or Ear of the Greeks ; and what that 
means, nobody very well knows. But why 
Prima- Vera ? and what is Seconda, or second 
Vera ? The word is too long and lazy, as well 
as obscure, compared with our brisk, little, 
potent, obvious, and leaping Spring, — full of all 
fountains,buds,birds, sweetbriars,and sunbeams. 

" Leaping, like wanton kids in pleasant spring," 

says the poet, speaking of the "wood-born 
people " that flocked about fair Serena. How 
much better the word spring suits here with 
the word leaping, than if it had been prima-vera ! 
How much more sudden and starting, like the 
boundings of the kids ! Prima-vera is a beauti- 
ful word ; let us not gainsay it ; but it is more 
suitable to the maturity, than to the very 
springing of spring, as its first syllable would 
pretend. So long and comparatively languid a 
word ought to belong to that side of the season 
which is next to summer. Ver, the Latin word, 
is better, — or rather Greek word ; for as we 
have shown before, it comes from the Greek, — 
like almost every good thing in Latin. It is a 
pity one does not know what it means ; for the 
Greeks had "good meanings" (as Sir Hugh 
Evans would say) ; and their Ver, Feer, or Ear, 
we may be sure, meant something pleasant, — 
possibly the rising of the sap ; or something 
connected with the new air ; or with love : for 



COLOUR. 



etymologists, with their happy facilities, might 
bring it from the roots of such words. Ben 
Jonson has made a beautiful name of its adjec- 
tive (Earinos, vernal) for the heroine of his 
'Sad Shepherd,'— 

" Earine, 
Who had her very heing, and her name, 
With the first knots, or huddings of the Spring ; 
Born with the primrose and the violet, 
Or earliest roses blown ; when Cupid smiled, 
And Venus led the Graces out to dance ; 
And all the flowers and sweets in Nature's lap 
Leap'd out." 

The lightest thoughts have their roots in 
gravity, and the most fugitive colours of the 
world are set off by the mighty back-ground of 
eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so 
light and airy a thing as the vernal season 
arises from the consciousness that the world is 
young again ; that the spring has come round, 
that we shall not all cease, and be no world. 
Nature has begun again, and not begun for 
nothing. One fancies somehow that she could 
not have the heart to put a stop to us in April 
or May. She may pluck away a poor little 
life here and there ; nay, many blossoms of 
youth,— but not all, — not the whole garden of 
life. She prunes, but does not destroy. If she 
did, — if she were in the mind to have done 
with us, — to look upon us as an experiment not 
worth going on with, as a set of ungenial and 
obstinate compounds which refused to co-ope- 
rate in her sweet designs, and could not be 
made to answer in the working, — depend upon 
it she would take pity on our incapability and 
bad humours, and conveniently quash us in 
some dismal, sullen winter's day, just at the 
natural dying of the year, most likely in No- 
vember ; for Christmas is a sort of Spring 
itself, a winter-flowering. We care nothing 
for arguments about storms, earthquakes, or 
other apparently unseasonable interruptions of 
our pleasures : — we imitate, in that respect the 
magnanimous indifference, or what appears 
such, of the Great Mother herself, knowing 
that she means us the best in the gross ; — and 
also that we may all get our remedies for these 
evils in time, if we co-operate as before said. 
People in South America for instance, may 
learn from experience, and build so as to make 
a comparative nothing of those rockings of the 
ground. It is of the gross itself that we speak ; 
and sure we are, that with an eye to that, Nature 
does not feel as Pope ventures to say she does, 
or sees " with equal eye " — 

" Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, 

And now a bubble burst, and now a world," 

He may have flattered himself that he should 
think it a fine thing for his little poetship to sit 
upon a star, and look grand in his own eyes, 
from an eye so very dispassionate ; but Nature, 
who is the author of passion, and joy, and sorrow, 
does not look upon animate and inanimate, 
depend upon it, with the same want of sympa- 



thy. " A world " full of loves, and hopes, and 
endeavours, and of her own life and loveliness, 
is a far greater thing in her eyes, rest assured, 
than a "bubble ;" and, a fortiori, many worlds, 
or a " system," far greater than the " atom " 
talked of with so much complacency by this 
divine little whipper-snapper. Ergo,the moment 
the kind mother gives promise of a renewed 
year with these her green and budding signals, 
be certain she is not going to falsify them ; 
and that being sure of April, we are sure as 
far as November. As to our existence any 
further, that, we conceive, depends somewhat 
upon how we behave ourselves ; and therefore 
we would exhort everybody to do their best 
for the earth, and all that is upon it, in order 
that it and they may be thought worth con- 
tinuance. 

What ! shall we be put into a beautiful gar- 
den, and turn up our noses at it, and call it a 
"vale of tears," and all sorts of bad names 
(helping thereby to make it so), and yet confi- 
dently reckon that Nature will never shut it up, 
and have done with it, or set about forming a 
better stock of inhabitants ? Recollect, we 
beseech you, dear " Lord Worldly Wiseman," 
and you, " Sir Having," and my lady " Greedy," 
that there is reason for supposing that man was 
not always an inhabitant of this very fashion- 
able world, and somewhat larger globe ; and 
that perhaps the chief occupant before him was 
only of an inferior species to ourselves (odd as 
you may think it), who could not be brought to 
only know what a beautiful place he lived in, 
and so had another chance given him in a differ- 
ent shape. Good heavens ! If there were none 
but mere ladies and gentlemen, and city-men, 
and soldiers, upon earth, and no poets, readers, 
and milk-maids, to remind us that there was 
such a thing as Nature, we really should begin 
to tremble for Almack's and Change Alley 
about the 20th of next October ! 



IV.— COLOUR. 

In this beloved, beautiful, but sometimes 
foggy, and too often not very brilliant country 
of ours, we are not fond enough of colours, — 
not fond enough of a beauty, of which Nature 
herself is evidently very fond, and with which, 
like all the rest of her beauties, it is the busi- 
ness of civilised man to adorn and improve his 
own well-being. The summer season is a good 
time for becoming acquainted with them, for it 
is then we see them best, and may acquire a 
relish for them against the insipidity of winter. 
We remember a dyer in Genoa, who used to 
hang out his silks upon a high wall opposite 
his shop, where they shone with such lustre 
under the blue sky (we particularly remember 
some yellow ones) that it was a treat to pass 
that way. You hailed them at a distance, like 



WINDOWS. 



another sun 
Risen at noonday ; 

or as if Nature herself had been making some 
draperies out of butter-cups, and had just pre- 
sented the world with the phenomenon. It is 
the blue sky and clear air of their native land 
which have made the Italian painters so famous 
for colouring ; and Rubens and Watteau, like 
wise men, saw the good of transferring the 
beauty to the less fortunate climate of Flan- 
ders. One of the first things that attracted 
our notice in Italy was a red cap on the head 
of a boatman. In England, where nobody else 
wears such a cap, we should have thought of a 
butcher ; in Italy the sky set it off to such ad- 
vantage, that it reminded us of a scarlet bud. 

The Puritans, who did us a great deal of good, 
helped to do this harm for us. They degraded 
material beauty and gladness, as if essentially 
hostile to what was spiritually estimable ; 
whereas the desirable thing is to show the 
compatibility of both, and vindicate the hues 
of the creation. Thus the finest colours in 
men's dresses have at last almost come to be 
confined to livery servants and soldiers. A 
soldier's wife, or a market-woman, is the only 
female that ventures to wear a scarlet cloak ; 
and we have a favourite epithet of vitupera- 
tion, gaudy, which we bestow upon all colours 
that do not suit our melancholy. It is sheer 
want of heart and animal spirits. We were 
not always so. Puritanism, and wars, and 
debts, and the Dutch succession, and false ideas 
of utility, have all conspired to take gladness 
out of our eyesight, as well as jollity out of our 
pockets. We shall recover a better taste, 
and we trust, exhibit it to better advantage 
than before ; but we must begin by having 
faith in as many good things as possible, and 
not think ill of any one of heaven's means of 
making us cheerful, because in itself it is 
cheerful. "If a merry meeting is to be wished," 
says the man in Shakspeare, " may God pro- 
hibit it." So the more obviously cheerful and 
desirable anything is, the more we seem to beg 
the question in its disfavour. Beds, and yel- 
lows, and bright blues, are "gaudy ;" we must 
have nothing but browns, and blacks, and 
drab-colour or stone. Earth is not of this 
opinion ; nor the heavens either. Gardens do 
not think so ; nor the fields, nor the skies, nor 
the mountains, nor dawn, nor sunset, nor light 
itself, which is made of colours and holds them 
always ready in its crystal quiver, to shoot 
forth and divide into loveliness. The beautiful 
attracts the beautiful. Colours find homes of 
colour. To red go the red rays, and to purple 
the purple. The rainbow reads its beauteous 
lecture in the clouds, showing the sweet divi- 
sion of the hues ; and the mechanical " philo- 
sopher," as he calls himself, smiles with an air 
of superiority, and thinks he knows all about 
it, because the division is made. 

The little child, like the real philosopher, 



knows more, for his "heart leaps up," and he 
acknowledges a glad mystery. He feels the 
immensity of what he does not know ; and 
though the purely mechanical-minded man 
admits that such immensity exists with regard 
to himself, he does not feel it as the child or 
the wiser man does, and therefore he does not 
truly perceive, — does not thoroughly take it 
into his consciousness. He talks and acts as if 
he had come to the extent of his knowledge — 
and he has so. But beyond the dry line of 
knowledge lies beauty, and all which is beau- 
tiful in hope, and exalting in imagination. 

We feel as if there were a moral as well as 
material beauty in colour, — an inherent glad- 
ness, — an intention on the part of nature, 
to share with us a pleasure felt by herself. 
Colours are the smiles of nature. When they 
are extremely smiling, and break forth into 
other beauty besides, they are her laughs ; as in 
the flowers. The " laughing flowers," says the 
poet ; and it is the business of the poet to feel 
truths beyond the proof of the mechanician. 
Nature at all events, humanly speaking, is 
manifestly very fond of colour, for she has made 
nothing without it. Her skies are blue ; her fields 
green ; her waters vary with her skies ; her 
animals, minerals, vegetables, are all coloured. 
She paints a great many of them in apparently 
superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye 
how she loves colour. The pride of the peacock, 
or some stately exhibition of a quality very 
like pride, is a singular matter of fact, evidently 
connected with it. Youthful beauty in the 
human being is partly made up of it. One of 
the three great arts, with which Providence 
has adorned and humanised the mind, — Paint- 
ing, is founded upon the love and imitation of 
it. And the magnificence of empire can find 
nothing more precious, either to possess, or be 
proud of wearing than 

Fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price, 
As one of them, indifferently rated, 
May serve in peril of calamity 
To ransom great kings from captivity*. 



V._ WINDOWS. 

We have had a special regard for a window, 
ever since we sat in an old-fashioned one with 
a low seat to it in our childhood, and read a 
book. And for a like reason, we never see a 
door-way in a sequestered corner, with a 
similar accommodation for the infant stu- 
dent, without nestling to it in imagination, 
and taking out of our pocket the Arabian 
Nights, or Philip Quarll. The same recollection 
makes us prefer that kind of window to all 

* We had just quoted these lines before, but the reader 
will doubtless pardon the repetition. 



WINDOWS. 



others, and count our daily familiarity with it 
as by no means among the disservices rendered 
us by fortune. The very fact of its existence 
shows a liberality in the dimensions of old- 
fashioned walls. There is " cut and come 
again" in them. Had modern houses been 
made of cheeses, and La Fontaine's mouse 
found himself in one of them, he would have 
despised those rinds of buildings, — thin and 
fragile as if a miser had pared them away. 

Those modern windows are all of a piece, 
inside and out. They may make a show of 
having some thickness of wall at the sides, 
but it is only a hollow pretence for the con- 
venience of the shutters ; and even when the 
opportunity of forming a recess is thus offered 
them, it is not taken. It is seldom they con- 
tain a seat even in the parlour ; and the draw- 
ing-room windows in such houses cannot com- 
fortably have any, because, for the benefit of 
one's feet in this cold climate, they are cut 
down to the floor ; a veranda being probably 
overhead to intercept any superfluity of sun- 
shine. " If a merry meeting is to be wished," 
says the man in Shakspeare, "may God prohibit 
it." If there is any sunshine to be had, stave 
it off ; especially if you have been grumbling 
for its absence all the rest of the year. 

" Would you have us sit then and be baked, 
Mr. Seer ?" 

Dear madam, you ask the question with so 
pleasant a voice, and such a pretty good-natured 
exaggeration, that you are evidently one of 
those who may do, or not do, just what you 
please. We shall not find fault with you, if 
you close every shutter in the room, let the 
sun be never so smiling. Besides, we give up 
the hottest days in July and August. But 
grant us at any rate, that to have verandas 
always, as we see them in some houses, is hardly 
more reasonable, than having windows down 
to the floor at any time ; and that the horror of 
a sunshine, by no means too abundant in this 
region, has more to do with the fear of dis- 
coloured curtains and carpets than it ought to 
have, especially among the rich. What signi- 
fies the flying of a few colours, easily replaced, 
compared with the giving a proper welcome 
to the great colourer himself, — the sun that 
makes all things beautiful ? There are few 
sights in your town-house more cheerful than 
a sudden burst of sun into the room, smiting 
I the floor into so many windows, and making 
the roses on the very carpet look as if they 
felt it. Let them fade in good season as the 
others do ; and make up for the expense, dear 
fashionable people, by staying a little more at 
home, keeping better hours, and saving the 
roses on your cheeks. 

Verandas have one good effect. They are 
an ornament to the house outside, and serve 
to hide the shabby cut of the windows. Still 
more is to be said for them, where they and 
the balcony include flowers. Yet windows 



down to the floor we hold to be a nuisance 
always — unnecessary, uncomfortable, absurd 
— to say nothing of perils of broken panes and 
scolded children. They let draughts of air in 
across the floor, where nobody wants them ; 
they admit superfluous light, — from earthwards 
instead of from heaven ; they render a seat in 
the window impossible or disagreeable ; they 
hinder the fire from sufficiently warming the 
room in Avinter-time ; and they make windows 
partake too much of out-of-doors, showing the 
inhabitants at full length as they walk about, 
and contradicting the sense of snugness and 
seclusion. Lastly, when they have no veil or 
other ornament outside, they look gawky and 
out of proportion. But the outside cut of 
windows in this country is almost universally 
an eyesore. We have denounced them before, 
and shall denounce them again, in the hopes 
that house-builders may be brought to show 
some proofs of being the "architects" they 
call themselves, and dare to go to an expense 
of nine and sixpence for a little wood or 
plaster, to make a border with. Look at the 
windows down the streets, at the west-end of 
the town, and they are almost all mere cuts in 
the wall, just such as they make for barracks 
and work-houses. The windows of an Irish 
cabin are as good, as far as architecture is con- 
cerned. The port-holes of a man-of-war have 
as much merit. There is no pediment, nor 
border ; seldom even one visible variety of 
any sort, not a coloured brick. And it is the 
same with the streets that contain shops, 
except, in some instances, those of the latest 
construction ; which if not in the best taste 
otherwise, are built with a little more gene- 
rosity, and that is a good step towards taste. 
When we meet with windows of a better sort, 
the effect is like quitting the sight of a stupid 
miser for that of a liberal genius. Such are 
the windows in some of the nobler squares ; 
and you may see them occasionally over shops 
in the Strand and Piccadilly. Observe for 
instance the windows of Messrs. Greensill and 
Co. the lamp-oil manufacturers in the Strand, 
compared with those of the neighbours ; and 
see what a superiority is given to them by the 
mere fact of their having borders, and some- 
thing like architectural design. We will 
venture to say it is serviceable even in a 
business point of view ; for such houses look 
wealthier ; and it is notorious, that the repu- 
tation of money brings money. Where there 
is no elegance of this kind, (and of course also 
where there is,) a box of flowers along the 
windows gives a liberal look to a house, still 
more creditable to the occupants, from the 
certainty we have of its being their own 
work. See in Piccadilly, the houses of Messrs. 
Bickards the spirit-merchants, near Regent 
Street, and Messrs. Meyer and Co. the wax- 
chandlers, near the Park end. We never pass 
the latter without being grateful for the beauti- 



10 



WINDOWS. 



ful show of nasturtiums, — a plant which it is 
an elegance itself to have so much regard for. 
There is also something very agreeable in the 
good-natured kind of intercourse thus kept up 
between the inmates of a house and those who 
pass it. The former appeal to one's good 
opinion in the best manner, by complimenting 
us with a share of their elegances ; and the 
latter are happy to acknowledge the appeal, 
for their own sakes as well as that of the 
flowers. Imagine (what perhaps will one day 
be the case) whole streets adorned in this 
manner, right and left ; and multitudes pro- 
ceeding on their tasks through avenues of 
lilies and geraniums. Why should they not ? 
Nature has given us the means, and they are 
innocent, animating, and contribute to our 
piety towards her. We do not half enough 
avail ourselves of the cheap riches wherewith 
she adorns the earth. We also get the most 
trivial mistakes in our head, and think them 
refinements, and are afraid of being "vulgar!" 
A few seeds, for instance, and a little trouble, 
would clothe our houses every summer, as 
high as we chose, with draperies of green and 
scarlet ; and after admiring the beauty, we 
might eat the produce. But then this produce 
is a bean ; and because beans are found at 
poor tables, we despise them ! Nobody despises 
a vine in front of a house ; for vines are polite, 
and the grapes seldom good enough to be of 
any use. Well ; use, we grant, is not the only 
thing, but surely we have no right to think 
ourselves unbigoted to it, when it teaches us 
to despise beauty. In Italy, where the drink 
is not common, people have a great respect for 
beer, and would perhaps rather see a drapery 
of hops at the front of a house, than vine- 
leaves. Hops are like vines ; yet who thinks 
of adorning his house with them in England ? 
No : they remind us of the ale-house instead 
of nature and her beauties ; and therefore 
they are " vulgar." But is it not we who are 
vulgar, in thinking of the ale-house, when 
nature and her beauties are the greater 
idea ? 

It is objected to vegetation against walls and 
windows, that it harbours insects ; and good 
housewives declare they shall be " overrun." 
If this be the fact, care should be taken against 
the consequences ; and should the care prove 
unavailing, everything must be sacrificed to 
cleanliness. But is the charge well-founded ? 
and if well-founded in respect to some sorts of 
vegetation, is it equally so with all ? we mean, 
with regard to the inability to keep out the 
insects. There is a prejudice against ivy on 
houses, on the score of its harbouring wet, and 
making the houses damp ; yet this opinion has 
been discovered to be so groundless that the 
very contrary is the fact. Ivy is found to be 
a remedy for damp walls. It wards off the 
rain, and secures to them a remarkable state 
of dryness ; as any one may see for himself by 



turning a bush of it aside, and observing the 
singular drought and dustiness prevailing be- 
tween the brick or mortar and the back of the 
leaves. 

Plate-glass has a beautiful look in windows ; 
but it is too costly to become general. We 
remember when the late Mrs. Orby Hunter 
lived in Grosvenor Place, it was quite a treat 
to pass by her parlour window, which was an 
arch, full of large panes of plate-glass, with 
a box of briliant flowers underneath it, and 
jessamine and other creepers making a bower 
of the wall. Perhaps the house has the same 
aspect still ; but we thought the female name 
on the door was particularly suited it, and had 
a just ostentation. 

Painted glass is still finer ; but we have 
never seen it used in the front windows of a 
house except in narrow strips, or over door- 
ways ; which is a pity, for its loveliness is 
extreme. A good portion of the upper part of 
a window or windows might be allotted to it 
with great effect, in houses where there is 
light to spare ; and it might be turned to 
elegant and otherwise useful account, by 
means of devices, and even regular pictures. 
A beautiful art, little known, might thus be 
restored. But we must have a separate article 
on painted windows ; which are a kind of 
passion of ours. They make us loath to speak 
of them, without stopping, and receiving on 
our admiring eyes the beauty of their blessing. 
For such is the feeling they always give us. 
They seem, beyond any other inanimate object, 
except the finest pictures by the great masters 
(which can hardly be called such), to unite 
something celestial, with the most gorgeous 
charm of the senses. There are more reasons 
than one for this feeling ; but we must not be 
tempted to enter upon them here. The win- 
dow must have us to itself, as in the rich quiet 
of a cathedral aisle. 

We will conclude this outside consideration 
of windows (for we must have another and 
longer one for the inside), by dropping from a 
very heavenly to a very earthly picture, though 
it be one still suspended in the air. It is that 
of the gallant footman in one of Steele's come- 
dies, making love to the maid-servant, while 
they are both occupied in cleaning the windows 
of their master's house. He does not make 
love as his honest-hearted brother Dodsley 
would have done (who from a footman became 
a man of letters) ; still less in the style of his 
illustrious brother Rousseau (for he too was 
once a footman) ; though there is one passage 
in the incident, which the ultra-sensitive lackey 
of the " Confessions " (who afterwards shook 
the earth with the very strength of his weak- 
ness) would have turned to fine sentimental 
account. The language also is a little too good 
even for a fine gentleman's gentleman ; but the 
"exquisite" airs the fellow gives himself, are 
not so much beyond the reach of brisk foot- 



WINDOWS. 



man-imitation, as not to have an essence of 
truth in them, pleasantly showing the natural 
likeness between fops of all conditions ; and 
they are as happily responded to by those of 
the lady. The combination of the unsophisti- 
cate picture at the close of the extract, with 
the languishing comment made upon it, is 
extremely ludicrous. 

Enter Tom, meeting Philljs. 

Tom. Well, Phillis !— What ! with a face as 
if you had never seen me before ? — What a 
work have I to do now ! She has seen some 
new visitant at their house whose airs she has 
catched, and is resolved to practise them upon 
me. Numberless are the changes she'll dance 
through before she'll answer this plain ques- 
tion, mdelicit, Have you delivered my master's 
letter to your lady ? Nay, I know her too 
well to ask an account of it in an ordinary 
way ; I'll be in my airs as well as she. (Aside. J 
Well, madam, as unhappy as you are at present 
pleased to make me, I would not in the general 
be any other than what I am ; I would not be 
a bit wiser, a bit richer, a bit taller, a bit 
shorter, than I am at this instant. (Looking 
steadfastly at her.) 

Phil. Did ever anybody doubt, Master Thomas, 
that you were extremely satisfied with your 
sweet self ? 

Tom. I am indeed. The thing I have least 
reason to be satisfied with is my fortune, and 
I am glad of my poverty ; perhaps, if I were 
rich, I should overlook the finest woman in 
the world, that wants nothing but riches to be 
thought so. 

Phil. How prettily was that said ! But 
I'll have a great deal more before I say one 
word. (Aside.) 

Tom. I should perhaps have been stupidly 
above her had I not been her equal, and by 
not being her equal never had an opportunity 
of being her slave. I am my master's servant 
from hire, — I am my mistress's servant from 
choice, would she but approve my passion. 

Phil. I think it is the first time I ever heard 
you speak of it with any sense of anguish, if 
you really suffer any. 

Tom. Ah, Phillis ! can you doubt after what 
you have seen ? 

Phil. I know not what I have seen, nor 
what I have heard ; but since I am at leisure, 
you may tell me when you fell in love with 
me, how you fell in love with me, and what 
you have suffered, or are ready to suffer, for 
me. 

Tom. Oh ! the unmerciful jade ! when I am 
in haste about my master's letter : — But I must 
go through it (aside). Ah ! Too well I remem- 
ber when, and on what occasion, and how I 
was first surprised. It was on the First of 
April one thousand seven hundred and fifteen 
I came into Mr. Sealand's service ; I was then 



a little hobble-de-hoy, and you a little tight 
girl, a favourite handmaid of the house-keeper. 
At that time we neither one of us knew what 
was in us. I remember I was ordered to get 
out of the window, one pair of stairs, to rub 
the sashes clean — the person employed on the 
inner side was your charming self, whom I 
had never seen before. 

Phil. I think I remember the silly accident. 
What made you, you oaf, ready to fall down 
into the street ? 

Tom. You know not, I warrant you ; you 
could not guess what surprised me — you took 
no delight when you immediately grew wanton 
in your conquest, and put your lips close and 
breathed upon the glass, and when my lips 
approached, a dirty cloth you rubbed against 
my face, and hid your beauteous form ; when 
I again drew near, you spit and rubbed, and 
smiled at my undoing. 



VI.— WINDOWS, CONSIDERED FROM 
INSIDE. 

The other day a butterfly came into our room 
and began beating himself against the upper 
panes of a window half open, thinking to get 
back. It is a nice point — relieving your but- 
terfly — he is a creature so delicate. If you 
handle him without ceremony, you bring away 
on your fingers, something which you take to 
be down, but which is plumes of feathers ; and 
as there are no fairies at hand, two atoms 
high, to make pens of the quills, and write 
"articles" on the invisible, there would be a 
loss. Mr. Bentham's ghost would visit us, 
shaking his venerable locks at such unneces- 
sary-pain-producing and reasonable-pleasure- 
preventing heedlessness. Then if you brush 
him downwards, you stand a chance of hurting 
his antennae, or feelers, and of not knowing 
what mischief you may do to his eyes, or his 
sense of touch, or his instruments of dialogue ; 
for some philosophers hold that insects talk 
with their feelers, as dumb people do with their 
fingers. However, some suffering must be 
hazarded in order to prevent worse, even to 
the least and most delicate of heaven's crea- 
tures, who would not know pleasure if they did 
not know pain ; and perhaps the merrier and 
happier they are in general, the greater the 
lumps of pain they can bear. Besides, all must 
have their share, or how would the burden of 
the great blockish necessity be equally dis- 
tributed : and finally, what business had little 
Papilio to come into a place unfit for him, and 
get bothering himself with glass ? Oh, faith ! 
— your butterfly must learn experience, as 
well as your Buonaparte. 

There was he, beating, fluttering, flouncing, 
— wondering that he could not get through so 
clear a matter (for so glass appears to be to 
insects, as well as to men), and tearing his 



12 



WINDOWS. 



silken little soul out with ineffectual energy. 
What plumage he must have left upon the 
pane ! What feathers and colours, strewed 
about, as if some fine lady had gone mad 
against a ball-room door, for not being let in ! 

But we had a higher simile for him than 
that. « Truly," thought we, " little friend, thou 
art like some of the great German transcend- 
entalists, who in thinking to reach at heaven 
by an impossible way (such at least it seemeth 
at present) run the hazard of cracking their 
brains, and spoiling their wings for ever ; 
whereas, if thou and they would but stoop a 
little lower, and begin with earth first, there, 
before thee, lieth open heaven as well as earth' ; 
and thou mayest mount high as thou wilt, 
after thy own happy fashion, thinking less and 
enjoying all things." 

And hereupon we contrived to get him 
downwards, — and forth, out into the air, 
sprang he, — first against the lime-trees, and 
then over them into the blue ether, — as if he 
had resolved to put our advice into practice. 

We have before spoken of the fret and fury 
into which the common fly seems to put him- 
self against a window. Bees appear to take it 
more patiently, out of a greater knowledge ; 
and slip about with a strange air of hopeless- 
ness. They seem to "give it up." These 
things, as Mr. Pepys said of the humanities at 
court, " it is pretty to observe." Glass itself is 
a phenomenon that might alone serve a reflect- 
ing observer with meditation for a whole 
morning, — so substantial and yet so air-like, so 
close and compact to keep away the cold, yet 
so transparent and facile to let in light, the 
gentlest of all things, — so palpably something, 
and yet to the eye and the perceptions a kind 
of nothing ! It seems absolutely to deceive 
insects in this respect, which is remarkable, 
considering how closely they handle it, and 
what microscopic eyes we suppose them to have. 
We should doubt (as we used to do) whether 
we did not mistake their ideas on the subject, 
if we had not so often seen their repeated 
dashings of themselves against the panes, their 
stoppings (as if to take breath), and then their 
recommencement of the same violence. It is 
difficult to suppose that they do this for mere 
pleasure, for it looks as if they must hurt 
themselves. Observe in particular the tre- 
mendous thumps given himself by that great 
hulking fellow of a fly, that Ajax of the 
Diptera, the blue-bottle. Yet in autumn, in 
their old age, flies congregate in windows as 
elsewhere, and will take the matter so quietly 
as sometimes to stand still for hours together. 
We suppose they love the warmth, or the 
light ; and that either they have found out the 
secret as to the rest, or 

" Years have brought the philosophic mind." 

Why should Fly plague himself any longer 
with household matters which he cannot alter ? 



He has tried hard in his time ; and now he 
resigns himself like a wise insect, and will 
taste whatsoever tranquil pleasures remain for 
him, without beating his brains or losing his 
temper any longer. In natural livers, pleasure 
survives pain. Even the artificial, who keep 
up their troubles so long by pride, self-will, and 
the want of stimulants, contrive to get more 
pleasure than is supposed out of pain itself, 
especially by means of thinking themselves ill- 
used, and of grumbling. If the heart (for want 
of better training) does not much keep up its 
action with them, the spleen does ; and so 
there is action of some sort : and whenever 
there is action, there is life ; and life is found 
to have something valuable in it for its own 
sake, apart from ordinary considerations either 
of pain or pleasure. But your fly and your 
philosopher are for pleasure too, to the last, if 
it be harmless. Give old Musca a grain of 
sugar, and see how he will put down his pro- 
boscis to it, and dot, and pound, and suck it in, 
and be as happy as an old West India gentle- 
man pondering on his sugar cane and extracting 
a pleasure out of some dulcet recollection. 

Gamblers, for want of a sensation, have been 
known to start up from their wine, and lay a 
bet upon two rain drops coming down a pane 
of glass. How poor are those gentry, even 
when they win, compared with observers 
whose resources need never fail them ! To the 
latter, if they please, the rain-drop itself is a 
world, — a world of beauty and mystery and 
aboriginal idea, bringing before them a thou- 
sand images of proportion, and reflection, and 
the elements, and light, and colour, and round- 
ness, and delicacy, and fluency, and beneficence, 
and the refreshed flowers, and the growing 
corn, and dewdrops on the bushes, and the 
tears that fall from gentle eyes, and the ocean, 
and the rainbow, and the origin of all things. 
In water, we behold one of the old primeval 
mysteries of which the world was made. 
Thus, the commonest rain-drop on a pane 
of glass becomes a visitor from the solitudes of 
time. 

A window, to those who have read a little in 
Nature's school, thus becomes a book, or a 
picture, on which her genius may be studied, 
handicraft though the canvas be, and little as 
the glazier may have thought of it. Not that we 
are to predicate ignorance of your glazier now- 
a-days, any more than of other classes that 
compose the various readers of penny and j 
three-half-penny philosophy, — cheap visitor, | 
like the sunbeams, of houses of all sorts. The j 
glazier could probably give many a richer man j 
information respecting his glass, and his dia- I 
mond, and his putty, (no anti-climax in these i 
analytical days,) and let him into a secret or j 
two, besides, respecting the amusement to be 
derived from it. (We have just got up from j 
our work to inform ourselves of the nature 
and properties of the said mystery, putty ; and 



WINDOWS. 



13 



should blush for the confession, if the blush 
would not imply that a similar ignorance were 
less common with us than it is.) 

But a window is a frame for other pictures 
besides its own ; sometimes for moving ones, 
as in the instance of a cloud going along, or a 
bird, or a flash of lightning ; sometimes for the 
distant landscape, sometimes the nearer one, 
or the trees that are close to it, with their 
lights and shades ; often for the passing mul- 
titude. A picture, a harmony, is observable, 
even in the drapery of the curtains that invest 
it ; much more in the sunny vine-leaves or 
roses that may be visible on the borders, or 
that are trailed against it, and which render 
many a poor casement so pleasant. The other 
day, in a very humble cottage window in the 
suburbs, we saw that beautiful plant, the nas- 
turtium, trained over it on several strings ; 
which must have furnished the inmates with a 
screen as they sate at their work or at their 
tea inside, and at the same time permitted 
them to see through into the road, thus con- 
stituting a far better blind than is to be found 
in many great houses. Sights like these give 
a favourable impression of the dispositions and 
i habits of the people within, — show how superior 
they are to their sophistications, if rich, and 
how possessed of natural refinement, if among 
the poorer classes. Oh ! the human mind is a 
fine graceful thing everywhere, if the music of 
nature does but seize its attention, and throw 
it into its natural attitude. But so little has 
the " schoolmaster " yet got hold of this point, 
or made way with it, and so occupied are men 
with digging gold out of the ground, and 
neglecting the other treasures which they toss 
about in profusion during the operation (as if 
the clay were better than the flowers which it 
produced), that few make the most of the 
means and appliances for enjoyment that lie 
round about them, even in their very walls 
and rooms. Look at the windows down a 
street, and generally speaking they are all 
barren. The inmates might see through roses 
and geraniums, if they would ; but they do 
not think of it, or not with loving knowledge 
enough to take the trouble. Those who have 
the advantage of living in the country or the 
suburbs, are led in many instances to do better, 
though their necessity for agreeable sights is 
not so great. But the presence of nature 
tempts them to imitate her. There are few 
windows anywhere which might not be used to 
better advantage than they are, if we have a 
little money, or can procure even a few seeds. 
We have read an art of blowing the fire. 
There is an art even in the shutting and open- 
ing of windows. People might close them 
more against dull objects, and open them more 
to pleasant ones, and to the air. For a few 
pence, they might have beautiful colours and 
odours, and a pleasing task, emulous of the 
showers of April, beneficent as May ; for they 



who cultivate flowers in their windows (as we 
have hinted before) are led instinctively to 
cultivate them for others as well as themselves ; 
nay, in one respect they do it more so ; for you 
may observe, that wherever there is this 
" fenestral horticulture," (as Evelyn would 
have called your window-gardening,) the flowers 
are turned with their faces towards the street. 

But " there is an art in the shutting and 
opening of windows." — Yes, for the sake of air 
(which ought to be had night as well as day, 
in reasonable measure, and with precautions), 
and for the sake of excluding, or admitting, 
what is to be seen out of doors. Suppose, for 
example, a house is partly opposite some 
pleasant, and partly some unpleasant, object ; 
the one, a tree or garden ; the other, a gin- 
shop or a squalid lane. The sight of the first 
should be admitted as constantly as possible, 
and with open window. That of the other, if 
you are rich enough, can be shut out with a 
painted blind, that shall substitute a beautiful 
landscape for the nuisance ; or a blind of 
another sort will serve the purpose ; or if even 
a blind cannot be afforded, the shutters may 
be partly closed. Shutters should always be 
divided in two, horizontally as well as other- 
wise, for purposes of this kind. It is some- 
times pleasant to close the lower portion, if 
only to preserve a greater sense of quiet and 
seclusion, and to read or write the more to 
yourself; light from above having both a 
softer and stronger effect, than when admitted 
from all quarters. We have seen shutters, by 
judicious management in this way, in the 
house of a poor man who had a taste for 
nature, contribute to the comfort and even 
elegance of a room in a surprising manner, 
and (by the opening of the lower portions and 
the closure of the upper) at once shut out all 
the sun that was not wanted, and convert a 
row of stunted trees into an appearance of 
interminable foliage, as thick as if it had been 
in a forest. 

"But the fact was otherwise;" cries some 
fastidious personage, more nice than wise ; 
" you knew there was no forest, and therefore 
could not have been deceived." 

"Well, my dear Sir, but deception is not 
necessary to every one's pleasure ; and fact, is 
not merely what you take it for. The fact of 
there being no forest might have been the 
only fact with yourself, and so have prevented 
the enjoyment ; but to a livelier fancy, there 
would have been the fact of the imagination 
of the forest (for everything is a fact which 
does anything for us)*, and there would also 

* Facio, factum (Latin) — to do, done. What is done in 
imagination, makes a greater or less impression according 
to the power to receive it ; but it is unquestionably done, 
if it impresses us at all ; and thus becomes, after its kind, 
a fact. A stupid fellow, utterly without imagination, 
requires tickling to make him laugh ; a livelier one laughs 
at a comedy, or at the bare apprehension of a thing laugh- 
able. In both instances there is a real impression though 



14 



A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW. 



have been the fact of having cultivated the 
imagination, and the fact of our willingness to 
be pleased, and the fact of the books we have 
read, and above all, the fact of the positive 
satisfaction. If a man be pleased, it is in vain 
you tell him he has no cause to be pleased. 
The cause is proved by the consequence. 
Whether the cause be rightly or wrongly 
cultivated, is another matter. The good of it 
is assumed in the present instance ; and it 
would take more facts than are in the posses- 
sion of a "mere matter-of-fact man" to dis- 
prove it. Matter of fact and spirit of fact 
must both be appreciated, in order to do justice 
to the riches of nature. We are made of mind 
as well as body, — of imagination as well as 
senses. The same mysterious faculty which 
sees what is before the eyes, sees also what is 
suggested to the memory. Matter of fact is 
only the more palpable world, around which a 
thousand spirits of fact are playing, like angels 
in a picture. Not to see both, is to be a poor 
unattended creature, who walks about in the 
world conscious of nothing but himself, or at 
best of what the horse-jockey and the coach- 
maker has done for him. If his banker fails, 
he is ruined ! Not so those who, in addition 
to the resources of their industry, have stock 
in all the banks of nature and art, (pardon us 
this pun for the sake of what grows on it,) and 
whose consolations cannot wholly fail them, 
as long as they have a flower to look upon, 
and a blood not entirely vitiated. 

A window high up in a building, and com- 
manding a fine prospect, is a sort of looking 
out of the air, and gives a sense of power, and 
of superiority to earth. The higher also you 
go, the healthier. We speak of such windows 
as Milton fancied, when he wished that his 
lamp should be seen at midnight in " some high 
lonely tower ;" a passage, justly admired for 
the good-nature as well as loftiness of the wish, 
thus desiring that wayfarers should be the 
better for his studies, and enjoy the evidence 
of their fellow-creature's vigils. But elevations 
of this kind are not readily to be had. As to 
health, we believe that a very little lift above 
the ground-floor, and so on as you ascend, 
grows healthier in proportion. Malaria (bad 
air) in the countries where a plague of that 
kind is prevalent, is understood to be confined 
to a certain distance from the earth ; and we 
really believe, that even in the healthiest quar- 
ters, where no positive harm is done by nearness 
to it, the air is better as the houses ascend, and 
a seat in a window becomes valuable in propor- 
tion. By-and-by, perhaps, studies and other 
favourite sitting-rooms will be built accord- 
ingly ; and more retrospective reverence be 
shown to the " garrets" that used to be so 

from very different causes, one from " matter of fact," (if 
you please,) the other from spirit of fact ; but in either 
case the thing is done, the fact takes place. The moving 
cause exists somehow, or how could we he moved ? 



famous in the annals of authorship. The poor 
poet in Pope, who lay 

High in Drury lane, 
LulPd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, 

was better off there, than if he had occupied 
the ground-floor. For our parts, in order that 
we may save the dignity of our three-half- 
penny meditations, and at the same time give 
evidence of practising what we preach, we 
shall finish by stating, that we have written 
this article in a floor neither high enough to 
be so poetical nor low enough for too earthly 
a prose, — in a little study made healthy by an 
open window, and partly screened from over- 
lookers by a bit of the shutter, while our look- 
out presents us with a world of green leaves, 
and a red cottage top, a gothic tower of a 
church in the distance, and a glorious apple- 
tree close at hand, laden with its yellow 
balls. 

" Studded with apples, a beautiful show." 

Some kindness of this sort Fortune has never 
failed to preserve to us, as if in return for the 
love we bear to her rolling globe ; and now 
that the sincerity of our good-will has become 
known, none seem inclined to grudge it us, 
or to dispute the account to which we may 
turn it, for others as well as ourselves. 

We had something more to say of seats in 
windows, and a good deal of windows at inns, 
and of sitting and looking out of windows ; but 
we have other articles to write this week, of 
more length than usual, and must reserve it 
for a future number. 



VII,— A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW. 

NAMES OF FLOWERS. MYSTERY OF THEIR BEAUTY. 

In the window beside which we are writing 
this article, there is a geranium shining with 
its scarlet tops in the sun, the red of it being 
the more red for a back-ground of lime-trees 
which are at the same time breathing and 
panting like airy plenitudes of joy, and devel- 
oping their shifting depths of light and shade 
of russet brown and sunny inward gold. 

It seems to say "Paint me !" So here it is. 

Every now and then some anxious fly comes 
near it : — we hear the sound of a bee, though 
we see none ; and upon looking closer at the 
flowers, we observe that some of the petals are 
transparent with the light, while others are left 
in shade ; the leaves are equally adorned after 
their opaquer fashion, with those effects of the 
sky, showing their dark-brown rims ; and on 
one of them a red petal has fallen, where it 
lies on the brighter half of the shallow green 
cup, making its own red redder, and the green 
greener. We perceive, in imagination, the 



A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW. 



15 



scent of those good-natured leaves, which allow 
you to carry off their perfume on your fingers : 
for good-natured they are, in that respect, 
above almost all plants, and fittest for the hos- 
pitalities of your rooms. The very feel of the 
leaf has a household warmth in it something 
analogous to clothing and comfort. 

Why does not everybody (who can afford it) 
have a geranium in his window, or some other 
flower ? It is very cheap ; its cheapness is next 
to nothing if you raise it from seed, or from a 
slip ; and it is a beauty and a companion. It 
sweetens the air, rejoices the eye, links you 
with nature and innocence, and is something 
to love. And if it cannot love you in return, it 
cannot hate you ; it cannot utter a hateful 
thing, even for your neglecting it ; for though 
it is all beauty, it has no vanity : and such 
being the case, and living as it does purely to 
do you good and afford you pleasure, how will 
you be able to neglect it ? 

But pray, if you choose a geranium, or pos- 
sess but a few of them, let us persuade you to 
choose the scarlet kind, the "old original" 
geranium, and not a variety of it, — not one of 
the numerous diversities of red and white, blue 
and white, ivy-leaved, &c. Those are all beau- 
tiful, and very fit to vary a large collection ; 
but to prefer them to the originals of the race 
is to run the hazard of preferring the curious 
to the beautiful, and costliness to sound taste. 
It may be taken as a good general rule, that 
the most popular plants are the best ; for other- 
wise they would not have become such. And 
what the painters call * pure colours," are pre- 
ferable to mixed ones, for reasons which Nature 
herself has given when she painted the sky of 
one colour, and the fields of another, and divi- 
ded the rainbow itself into a few distinct hues, 
and made the red rose the queen of flowers. 
Variations of flowers are like variations in 
music, often beautiful as such, but almost 
always inferior to the theme on which they are 
founded, — the original air. And the rule holds 
good in beds of flowers, if they be not very large, 
or in any other small assemblage of them. Nay, 
the largest bed will look well, if of one beautiful 
colour ; while the most beautiful varieties may 
be inharmoniously mixed up. Contrast is a good 
thing, but we should first get a good sense of 
the thing to be contrasted, and we shall find 
this preferable to the contrast if we are not rich 
enough to have both in due measure. We do 
not in general love and honour any one single 
colour enough, and we are instinctively struck 
with a conviction to this effect when we see it 
abundantly set forth. The other day we saw a 
little garden- wall completely covered with nas- 
turtiums, and felt how much more beautiful it 
was than if anything had been mixed with it. 
For the leaves, and the light and shade, offer 
variety enough. The rest is all richness and 
simplicity united, — which is the triumph of an 
intense perception. Embower a cottage thickly 



and completely with nothing but roses, and 
nobody would desire the interference of an- 
other plant. 

Everything is handsome about the geranium, 
not excepting its name ; which cannot be said 
of all flowers, though we get to love ugly words 
when associated with pleasing ideas. The word 
"geranium" is soft and elegant ; the meaning is 
poor, for it comes from a Greek word signifying 
a crane, the fruit having a form resembling 
that of a crane's head or bill. Crane's-bill is 
the English name of Geranium ; though the 
learned appellation has superseded the verna- 
cular. But what a reason for naming the flower! 
as if the fruit were anything in comparison, or 
any one cared about it. Such distinctions, it is 
true, are useful to botanists ; but as plenty of 
learned names are sure to be reserved for the 
free-masonry of the science, it would be better 
for the world at large to invent joyous and 
beautiful names for these images of joy and 
beauty. In some instances, we have them ; 
such as heart's-ease, honeysuckle, marigold, 
mignonette (little darling), daisy (day's-eye), 
&c. And many flowers are so lovely, and have 
associated names otherwise unmeaning so plea- 
santly with one's memory, that no new ones 
would sound so well, or seem even to have such 
proper significations. In pronouncing the 
words, lilies, roses, pinks, tulips, jonquils, we see 
the things themselves, and seem to taste all 
their beauty and sweetness. " Pink," is a 
harsh petty word in itself, and yet assuredly 
it does not seem so ; for in the word we have 
the flower. It would be difficult to persuade 
ourselves that the word rose is not very beauti- 
ful. "Pea" is a poor Chinese-like monosyllable ; 
and " Briar " is rough and fierce, as it ought to 
be ; but when we think of Sweet-pea and Siceet- 
briar, the words appear quite worthy of their 
epithets. The poor monosyllable becomes rich 
in sweetness and appropriation ; the rough 
dissyllable also ; and the sweeter for its con- 
trast. But what can be said in behalf of liver- 
wort, blood-wort, dragon's head, devil's bit, and 
devil in a bush ? There was a charming line 
in some verses in last week's London Journal, 
written by a lady. 

I've marr'd your blisses, 

Those sweete kisses 
That the young breeze so loved yesterdaye ! 

I've seen ye sighing, 
Now ye're dying ;■ — 

How could I take your prettie lives away ? 

But you could not say this to dragon's head 
and devil's bit — 

O dragon's head, devil's bit, blood-wort,— say, 
How could I take your pretty lives away ? 

This would be like Dryden's version of the 
pig-squeaking in Chaucer — 

Poor swine ! as if their pretty hearts would break. 
The names of flowers in general among the 



1G 



A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW. 



polite, are neither pretty in themselves, nor 
give us information. The country people are 
apt to do them more justice. Goldy-locks, 
ladies'-fingers, bright-eye, rose-a-rubie, shep- 
herd's-clock, shepherd's -purse, sauce-alone, 
scarlet runners, sops-in-wine, sweet-william, 
&c. give us some ideas either useful or pleasant. 
But from the peasantry also come many un- 
congenial names, as bad as those of the bota- 
nists. Some of the latter are handsome as 
well as learned, have meanings easily found 
out by a little reading or scholarship, and are 
taking their place accordingly in popular no- 
menclatures : as amaranth, adonis, arbutus, 
asphodel, &c, but many others are as ugly as 
they are far-fetched, such as colchicum, tagetes, 
yucca, ixia, mesembryanthemum ; and as to 
the Adansonias, Browallias, Koempferias, John 
Tomkinsias, or whatever the personal names 
may be that are bestowed at the botanical font 
by their proud discoverers or godfathers, we 
have a respect for botanists and their pursuits, 
and wish them all sorts of " little immortalities" 
except these : unless they could unite them 
with something illustrative of the flower as 
well as themselves. A few, certainly, we 
should not like to displace, Browallia for one, 
which was given to a Peruvian flower by Lin- 
naeus, in honour of a friend of his of the name 
of Browall ; but the name should have included 
some idea of the thing named. The Browallia 
is remarkable for its brilliancy. " We cannot," 
says Mr. Curtis, " do it justice by any colours 
we have*." Now why not have called it Brow- 
all's Beauty? or Browall's Inimitable? The 
other day we were admiring an enormously 
beautiful apple, and were told it was called 
" Kirk's Admirable" after the gardener who 
raised it. We felt the propriety of this name 
directly. It was altogether to the purpose. 
There was use and beauty together — the name 
of the raiser and the excellence of the fruit 
raised. It is a pity that all fruits and flowers, 
and animals too, except those with good 
names, could not be passed in review before 
somebody with a genius for christening, as 
the creatures did before Adam in Paradise, 
and so have new names given them, worthy 
of their creation. 

Suppose flowers themselves were new ! Sup- 
pose they had just come into the world, a 
sweet reward for some new goodness : and that 
we had not yet seen them quite developed ; 
that they were in the act of growing ; had just 
issued with their green stalks out of the ground, 
and engaged the attention of the curious. 
Imagine what we should feel when we saw the 
first lateral stem bearing off from the main 
one, or putting forth a leaf. How we should 
watch the leaf gradually unfolding its little 
graceful hand ; then another, then another ; 

* We learn this from the Flora Domestica, an elegant 
and poetry-loving book, specially intended for cultivators 
of flowers at home. 



then the main stalk rising and producing 
more ; then one of them giving indications of 
an astonishing novelty, a bud ! then this mys- 
terious, lovely bud gradually unfolding like the 
leaf, amazing us, enchanting us, almost alarm- 
ing us with delight, as if we knew not what 
enchantment were to ensue : till at length, in 
all its fairy beauty, and odorous voluptuous- 
ness, and mysterious elaboration of tender and 
living sculpture, shone forth 

" the bright consummate flower !" 

Yet this phenomenon, to a mind of any 
thought and lovingness, is what may be said to 
take place every day ; for the commonest ob- 
jects are only wonders at which habit has made 
us cease to wonder, and the marvellousness of 
which we may renew at pleasure, by taking 
thought. Last spring, walking near some culti- 
vated grounds, and seeing a multitude of green 
stalks peeping forth, we amused ourselves with 
likening them to the plumes or other head- 
gear of fairies, and wondering what faces might 
ensue ; and from this exercise of the fancy, 
we fell to considering how true, and not merely 
fanciful those speculations were ; what a per- 
petual reproduction of the marvellous was 
carried on by Nature ; how utterly ignorant 
we were of the causes of the least and most 
disesteemed of the commonest vegetables ; and 
what a quantity of life, and beauty, and mys- 
tery, and use, and enjoyment, was to be found 
in them, composed out of all sorts of elements, 
and shaped as if by the hands of fairies. What 
workmanship, with no apparent workman ! 
What consummate elegance, though the result 
was to be nothing (as we call it) but a radish 
or an onion, and these were to be consumed, 
or thrown away by millions ! A rough tree 
grows up, and at the tips of his rugged and 
dark fingers he puts forth, — round, smooth, 
shining, and hanging delicately, — the golden 
apple, or the cheek-like beauty of the peach. 
The other day we were in a garden where In- 
dian corn was growing, and some of the cobs 
were plucked to show us. First one leaf or 
sheath was picked off, then another, then 
another, then a fourth, and so on, as if a fruit- 
seller was unpacking fruit out of papers ; and 
at last we came, inside, to the grains of the corn, 
packed up into cucumber-shapes of pale gold, 
and each of them pressed and flattened against 
each other, as if some human hand had been 
doing it in the caverns of the earth. But 
What Hand ! 

The same that made the poor yet rich hand 
(for is it not his workmanship also ?) that is 
tracing these marvelling lines, and which if it 
does not tremble to write them, it is because 
Love sustains, and because the heart also is a 
flower which has a right to be tranquil in the 
garden of the All- Wise. 



A WORD ON EARLY RISING. 



17 



VIII.— A WORD ON EARLY RISING. 

As we are writing this article before break- 
fast, at an earlier hour than usual, we are 
inclined to become grand and intolerant on 
the strength of our virtue, and to look around 
us and say, " Why is not every body up ? How 
caw people lie in bed at an hour like this, — 'the 
cool, the fragrant ? ' " 

" Falsely luxurious, will not man awake !" 

Thus exclaimed good-natured, enjoying Thom- 
son, and lay in bed till twelve ; after which he 
strolled into his garden at Richmond, and ate 
peaches oif a tree, with his hands in his waist- 
coat pockets ! Browsing ! A perfect specimen 
of a poetical elephant or rhinoceros ! Thomson, 
however, left an immortal book behind him, 
which excused his trespasses. What excuse 
shall mortality bring for hastening its end by 
lying in bed, and anticipating the grave ? for of 
all apparently innocent habits lying in bed is 
perhaps the worst ; while on the other hand, 
amidst all the different habits through which 
people have attained to a long life, it is said 
that in this one respect, and this only, they have 
all agreed ! No very long-lived man has been a 
late riser. Judge Holt is said to have been 
curious respecting longevity, and to have 
questioned every very old man that came be- 
fore him, as to his modes of living ; and in the 
matter of early rising there was no variation : 
every one of them got up betimes. One lived 
chiefly upon meat, another upon vegetables ; 
one drank no fermented liquors, another did 
drink them ; a fifth took care not to expose 
himself to the weather, another took no such 
care ; but every one of them was an early riser. 
All made their appearance at Nature's earliest 
levee, and she was pleased that they hailed her 
as soon as she waked, and that they valued her 
fresh air, and valued her skies, and her birds, 
and her balmy quiet ; or if they thought little 
of this, she was pleased that they took the first 
step in life, every day, calculated to make them 
happiest and most healthy ; and so she laid her 
hands upon their heads, and pronounced them 
good old boys, and enabled them to run about 
at wonderful ages, while their poor senior 
juniors were tumbling in down and gout. 

A most pleasant hour it is certainly, — when 
you are once up. The birds are singing in the 
trees ; everything else is noiseless, except the 
air, which comes sweeping every now and then 
through the sunshine, hindering the coming day 
from being hot. We feel it on our face, as we 
write. At a distance, far ofF, a dog occasionally 
barks ; and some huge fly is loud upon the 
window-pane. It is sweet to drink in at one's 
ears these innocent sounds, and this very sense 
of silence, and to say to one's self, " We are up ; 
— we are up, and are doing well ; — the beautiful 
creation is not unseen and unheard for want of 
ms." Oh, it's a prodigious moment when the 



vanity and the virtue can go together. We 
shall not say how early we write this article, 
lest we should appear immodest, and excite 
envy and despair. Neither shall we mention 
how often we thus get up, or the hour at which 
we generally rise, — leaving our readers to hope 
the best of us ; in return for which we will try 
to be as little exalted this morning as the sense 
of advantage over our neighbours will permit, 
and not despise them — a great stretch for an 
uncommon sense of merit. There for instance 
is C. ; — hard at it, we would swear ; as fast 
asleep as a church : — of what value are his 
books now, and his subtleties, and his specula- 
tions ? as dead, poor man ! as if they never 
existed. What proof is there of an immortal 
soul in that face with its eyes shut, and its 
mouth open, and not a word to say for itself, 
any more than the dog's ? — And W. there ; — 
what signifies his love for his children and his 
garden, neither of which he is now alive to, 
though the child-like birds are calling him, 
hopping amidst their songs ; and his breakfast 
would have twice the relish ? — And the L.'s with 
their garden and their music ? — the orchard has 
all the music to itself ; they will not arise to 
join it, though Nature manifestly intends con- 
certs to be of a morning as well as evening, and 
the animal Spirits are the first that are up in 
the universe. 

Then the streets and squares. Very much 
do we fear, that, for want of a proper education 
in these thoughts, the milkman, instead of de- 
spising all these shut-up windows, and the 
sleeping incapables inside, envies them for the 
riches that keep injuring their diaphragms and 
digestions, and that will render their breakfast 
not half so good as his. " Call you these gentle- 
folks ?" said a new maid-servant, in a family of 
our acquaintance, " why, they get up early in 
the morning ! — Only make me a lady, and see if 
I wouldn't lie a-bed." 

Seriously speaking, we believe that there is 
not a wholesomer thing than early rising, or 
one which, if persevered in for a very little while, 
would make a greater difference in the sensations 
of those who suffer from most causes of ill- 
health, particularly the besetting disease of 
these sedentary times, indigestion. We believe 
it would supersede the supposed necessity of a 
great deal of nauseous and pernicious medicine, 
that pretended friend, and ultimately certain 
foe, of all impatient stomachs. Its utility in 
other respects everybody acknowledges, though 
few profit by it as they might. Nothing renders 
a man so completely master of the day before 
him ; so gets rid of arrears, anticipates the ne- 
cessity of haste, and insures leisure. Sir Walter 
Scott is said to have written all his greatest 
works before breakfast ; he thus also procured 
time for being one of the most social of friends, 
and kind and attentive of correspondents. One 
sometimes regrets that experience passes into 
the shape of proverbs, since those who make 



18 



BREAKFAST IN SUMMER. 



use of them are apt to have no other know- 
ledge, and thus procure for them a worldly- 
character of the lowest order. Franklin did 
them no good, in this respect, by crowding 
them together in "Poor Richard's Almanack;" 
and Cervantes intimated the common-place 
abuse into which they were turning, by putting 
them into the mouth of Sancho Panza. Swift 
completed the ruin of some of them, in this 
country, by mingling them with the slip-slop of 
his "Polite Conversation," — a Tory libel on the 
talk of the upper ranks, to which nothing com- 
parable is to be found in the Whig or Radical 
objections of modern times. Yet, for the most 
part, proverbs are equally true and generous ; 
and there is as much profit for others as for a 
man's self in believing that " Early to bed and 
early to rise, will make a man healthy, and 
wealthy, and wise ;" for the voluntary early 
riser is seldom one who is insensible to the 
beauty as well as the uses of the spring of day ; 
and in becoming healthy and wise, as well as 
rich, he becomes good-humoured and conside- 
rate, and is disposed to make a handsome use 
of the wealth he acquires. Mere saving and 
sparing (which is the ugliest way to wealth) 
permits a man to lie in bed as long as most 
other people, especially in winter, when he 
saves fire by it ; but a gallant acquisition should 
be as stirring in this respect, as it is in others, 
and thus render its riches a comfort to it, in- 
stead of a means of unhealthy care, and a pre- 
paration for disappointment. How many rich 
men do we not see jaundiced and worn,not with 
necessary care but superfluous, and secretly 
cursing their riches, as if it were the fault of 
the money itself, and not of the bad manage- 
ment of their health ? These poor, unhappy, 
rich people, come at length to hug their money 
out of a sort of spleen and envy at the luckier 
and less miserable poverty that wants it, and 
thus lead the lives of dogs in the manger, and 
are almost tempted to hang themselves : whereas, 
if they could purify the current of their blood a 
little, which, perhaps, they might do by early 
rising alone, without a penny for physic, they 
might find themselves growing more patient, 
more cheerful, more liberal, and be astonished 
and delighted at receiving the praises of the 
community for their public spirit, and their 
patronage of noble institutions. Oh, if we 
could but get half London up at an earlier 
hour, how they, and our colleges and universi- 
ties, and royal academies, &c, would all take a 
start together ; and how the quack advertise- 
ments in the newspapers would diminish ! 

But we must not pretend, meanwhile, to be 
more virtuous ourselves than frail teachers are 
apt to be. The truth is, that lying in bed is so 
injurious to our particular state of health, that 
we are early risers in self-defence ; and we were 
not always such ; so that we are qualified to 
speak to both sides of the question. And as to 
our present article, it is owing to a relapse ! and 



we fear is a very dull one in consequence ; for 
we are obliged to begin it earlier than usual, in 
consequence of being late. We shall conclude 
it with the sprightliest testimony we can call to 
mind in favour of early rising, which is that of 
James the First, the royal poet of Scotland, a 
worthy disciple of Chaucer, who, when he was 
kept in unjust captivity during his youth by 
Henry the Fourth, fell in love with his future 
excellent queen, in consequence of seeing her 
through his prison windows walking in a garden 
at break of day, as Palamon and Arcite did 
Emilia ; which caused him to exclaim, in words 
that might be often quoted by others out of 
gratitude to the same hour, though on a dif- 
ferent occasion, 

" My custom was to rise 
Early as day. Oh happy exercise. 
By thee I came to joy out of torment !" 

See the 'King's Quair,' the poem he wrote about 
it. We quote from memory, but we believe 
with correctness. 



IX.— BREAKFAST IN SUMMER. 

<( Breakfast in Summer ! " cries a reader, in 
some narrow street in a city : " that means, I 
suppose, a breakfast out of doors, among trees ; 
or, at least, in some fine breakfast-room, looking 
upon a lawn, or into a conservatory. I have 
no such breakfast-room ; the article is not 
written for me. However, let us see what it 
says :— let us see whether, according to our 
friend's recipe, 

One can hold 
A silver-fork, and breast of pheasant on't, 
By thinking of sheer tea, and bread and butter. 

Nay let us do him justice too. Fancy is a good 
thing, though pheasant may be better. Come, 
let us see what he says ; — let us look at his 
Barmecide breakfast ; — at all the good things 
I am to eat and drink without tasting them. " 

Editor. Reader, thou art one of the right 
sort. — Thy fancy is large, though thy street be 
narrow. In one thing only do we find thee 
deficient. Thy faith is not perfect. 

Header. How ? Am I not prepared to enjoy 
what I cannot have ? And do I not know the 
Barmecide ? Am I not a reader of the Arabian 
Nights, — a willing visitor of that facetious per- 
sonage, who set the imaginary feast before the 
poor hungry devil Shacabac, and made him 
drunk with invisible wine, till, in the retributive 
intoxication of the humour, mine host got his 
ears boxed? 

Editor. Hallo — what is that you are saying ? 
— Oh you " intend nothing personal." Well, 
it is luckily added ; for, look you — we should 
otherwise have " heaped coals of fire on your 
head." The want of faith we complain of is 
not the want of faith in books and fancies, but 
in us and our intentions towards thyself; for 



BREAKFAST IN SUMMER. 



ID 



how earnest thou to suppose that we intended 
omitting thy breakfast, — thy unsophisticated 
cup of bohea, and most respectable bread and 
butter ? Why, it is of and to such breakfasts, 
that we jsvrite most. The others, unless their 
refinement be of the true, universal sort, might 
fancy they could do without us ; whereas those 
that really can do so, are not unwilling to give 
us reception, for sympathy's sake, if for nothing 
else. To enjoy is to reciprocate. We have 
the honour (in this our paper person) of appear- 
ing at some of the most refined breakfast-tables 
in the kingdom, some of these being at the 
same time the richest, and some the poorest, 
that epicure could seek or eschew ; that is to 
say, unintellectual epicure ; and when such a 
man is found at either, we venture to affirm 
that he misses the best things to be found near 
him. It does not become us to name names ; 
but we may illustrate the matter by saying, 
that, had it been written forty years back, we 
have good reason to think that the intentions 
of this our set of essays would have procured it 
no contemptuous welcome at the breakfast- 
table of Fox with his lords about him, or Burns 
with his " bonnie Jeanie " at his side. Porce- 
lain, or potter's-clay, silver or pewter, potted 
meats, oatmeal, or bacon, are all one to us, pro- 
vided there is a good appetite, and a desire to 
make the best of what is before us. Without that, 
who would breakfast with the richest of fools ? 
And with it, who that knows the relish of wit 
and good-humour, would not sit down to the 
humblest fare with inspired poverty ? 

Now the art of making the best of what is before us, 
(not in forgetfulness of social advancement, but 
in encouragement of it, and in aid of the requi- 
site activity or patience, as thecase mayrequire,) 
is one of the main objects of this publication ; 
and as the commoner breakfast seems to require 
it most, it is to such tables the present paper is 
chiefly addressed, — always supposing that the 
breakfaster is of an intelligent sort ; and 
not without a hope of suggesting a pleasant 
fancy or so to the richest tables that may want 
it. And there are too many such ! — perhaps 
because the table has too many " good things " 
on i t already, — too much potted gout, and t w el ve- 
shilling irritability. 

Few people, rich or poor, make the most of 
what they possess. In their anxiety to increase 
the amount of the means for future enjoyment, 
they are too apt to lose sight of the capability 
of them for present. Above all, they overlook 
the thousand helps to enjoyment which lie 
round about them, free to everybody, and ob- 
tainable by the very willingness to be pleased, 
assisted by that fancy and imagination which 
nature has bestowed, more or less, upon all 
human beings. Some miscalled Utilitarians, 
incapable of their own master's doctrine, may 
affect to undervalue fancy and imagination, as 
though they were not constituent properties of 
the human mind, and as if they themselves, 



the mistakers, did not enjoy even what they 
do by their very assistance ! Why they have 
fancies for this or that tea-cup, this or that coat, 
this or that pretty face ! They get handsome 
wives, when they can, as well as other people, 
and when plain ones would be quite as "useful !" 
How is that ? They pretend to admire the green 
fields, the blue sky, and would be ashamed to 
be insensible to the merits of the flowers. How 
can they take upon them to say where the pre- 
cise line should be drawn, and at what point it 
is we are to cease turning these perceptions of 
pleasure and elegance to account ? 

The first requisite towards enjoying a break- 
fast, or anything else, is the willingness to be 
pleased ; and the greatest proof and security of 
this willingness, is the willingness to please 
others. " Better" (says a venerable text) " is 
a dinner of herbs, where peace is, than a stalled 
ox with contention." Many a breakfast, that 
has every other means of enjoyment, is turned 
to bitterness, by unwilling discordant looks, 
perhaps to the great misery of some persons 
present, who would give and receive happiness, 
if at any other table. Now breakfast is a fore- 
taste of the whole day. Spoil that, and we 
probably spoil all. Begin it well, and if we are 
not very silly or ill-taught persons indeed, and 
at the mercy of every petty impulse of anger 
and offence, we in all probability make the rest 
of the day worthy of it. These petty impulses 
are apt to produce great miseries. And the 
most provoking part of the business is, that for 
want of better teaching, or of a little forethought, 
or imagination, they are sometimes indulged in 
by people of good hearts, who would be ready 
to tear their hair for anguish, if they saw you 
wounded or in a fit, and yet will make your 
days a heap of wretchedness, by the eternal 
repetition of these absurdities. 

It being premised then that persons must 
come to breakfast without faces sour enough 
to turn the milk, (and we begin to think that 
our cautions on this head are unnecessary to 
such readers as are likely to patronise us) 
we have to inform the most unpretending 
breakfaster — the man the least capable of potted 
meats, partridges, or preserves, — that in the 
commonest tea-equipage and fare which is set 
upon his board, he possesses a treasure of plea- 
sant thoughts ; and that if he can command 
but the addition of a flower, or a green bough, 
or a book, he may add to them a visible grace 
and luxury, such as the richest wits in the 
nation would respect. 

" True taste," says one of these very persons, 
(Mr. Rogers, in his notes to a poem,) " is an 
excellent economist. She delights in producing 
great effects by small means." This maxim 
holds good, we see, even amidst the costliest 
elegancies ; how much more is it precious to 
those whose means are of necessity small, while 
their hearts are large ? Suppose the reader is 
forced to be an economist, and to have nothing 



20 



BREAKFAST IN SUMMER. 



on his breakfast table but plain tea and bread 
and butter. Well ; he is not forced also to be 
sordid, or wretched, or without fancy, love, or 
intelligence. Neither are his tea-cups forced 
to be ill shaped, nor his bread and butter ill 
cut, nor his table-cloth dirty : and shapeliness 
and cleanliness are in themselves elegancies, 
and of no mean order. The spirit of all other 
elegance is in them, — that of selectness, — of 
the superiority to what is unfit and superfluous. 
Besides, a breakfast of this kind is the prefer- 
ence, or good old custom, of thousands who 
could afford a richer one. It may be called 
the staple breakfast of England ; and he who 
cannot make an excellent meal of it, would be 
in no very good way with the luxuries of a 
George the Fourth, still less with the robust 
meats of a huntsman. Delicate appetites may 
reasonably be stimulated a little, till regularity 
and exercise put them in better order ; and 
nothing is to be said against the innocencies of 
honeys and marmalades. But strong meats of 
a morning are only for those who take strong 
exercise, or who have made up their minds to 
defy the chances of gout and corpulence, or the 
undermining pre-digestion of pill-taking. 

If the man of taste is able to choose his mode 
of breakfasting in summer time, he will of 
course invest it with all the natural luxuries 
within his reach. He will have it in a room, 
looking upon grass and trees, hung with paint- 
ings, and furnished with books. He will sit 
with a beautiful portrait beside him, and the 
air shall breathe freshly into his room, the sun 
shall colour the foliage at his window, and 
shine betwixt their chequering shadows upon 
the table ; and the bee shall come to partake 
the honey he has made for him. 

But suppose that a man capable of relishing 
all these good things does not possess one of 
them, — at least can command none that require 
riches. Nay, suppose him destitute of every- 
thing but the plainest fare, in the plainest 
room, and in the least accommodating part of 
the city. What does he do ? Or what, upon 
reflection, may he be led to do ? Why, his taste 
will have recourse to its own natural and 
acquired riches, and make the utmost it can 
out of the materials before it. It will show 
itself superior to that of thousands of ignorant 
rich men, and make its good- will and its know- 
ledge open sources of entertainment to him 
unknown to treasures which they want the wit 
to unlock. Be willing to be pleased, and 
the power will come. Be a reader, getting all 
the information you can ; and every fresh 
information will paint some common-place 
article for you with brightness. Such a man 
as we have described will soon learn not to look 
upon the commonest table or chair without 
deriving pleasure from its shape or shape- 
ability ; nor on the cheapest and most ordinary 
tea-cup, without increasing that gratification 
with fifty amusing recollections of books and 



plants and colours, and strange birds, and the 
quaint domesticities of the Chinese. 

For instance, if he breakfasts in a room of 
the kind just mentioned, (which is putting the 
case as strongly as we can, and implies all the 
greater comforts that can be drawn from situ- 
ations of a better kind,) he will select the 
snuggest or least cheerless part of the room, to 
set his table in. If he can catch a glimpse of a 
tree from any part of a window, (and a great 
many more such glimpses are to be had in the 
city than people would suppose) he will plant 
his chair, if possible, within view of it ; or if 
no tree is to be had, perhaps the morning sun 
comes into his room, and he will contrive that 
his table shall have a slice of that. He will 
not be unamused even with the Jack-o'-lantern 
which strikes up to the ceiling, and dances 
with the stirring of his tea, glancing and 
twinkling like some chuckling elfin eye, or 
reminding him of some wit making his bril- 
liant reflections, and casting a light upon 
common-places. The sun is ever beautiful and 
noble, and brings a cheerfulness out of heaven 
itself into the humblest apartment, if we have 
but the spirit to welcome it. 

But if we have neither tree nor sun, and 
nobody with us to make amends, suppose it 
winter time, and that we have a fire. This is 
sun and company too, and such an associate as 
will either talk with us, if we choose to hear it : 
or leave us alone, and give us comfort unheard. 
It is now summer time, however, and we had 
better reserve our talk of fires for cold 
weather. Our present object is rather to point 
out some new modes of making the best of 
imaginary wants, than to dilate upon luxuries 
recognised by all. 

Suppose then, that neither a fire, the great 
friend in-doors, nor sunshine, the great friend 
out-of-doors, be found with us in our breakfast 
room, — that we could neither receive pleasure 
from the one, if we had it, nor can command 
a room into which the other makes its way, — 
what ornament is there, — what supply of light 
or beauty could we discover, at once exquisite 
and cheap, — that should furnish our humble 
board with a grace, precious in the eyes of the 
most intelligent among the rich ? Flowers. — 
Set flowers on your table, a whole nosegay if 
you can get it, — or but'two or three, — or a single 
flower, — a rose, a pink, nay a daisy. Bring a 
few daisies and butter-cups from your last field 
walk, and keep them alive in a little water; 
ay, preserve but a bunch of clover, or a hand- 
ful of flowering grass, one of the most elegant 
as well as cheap of nature's productions, — and 
you have something on your table that reminds 
you of the beauties of God's creation, and gives 
you a link with the poets and sages that have 
done it most honour. Put but a rose, or a lily, 
or a violet, on your table, and you and Lord 
Bacon have a custom in common ; for that 
great and wise man was in the habit of having 



^mm 



BREAKFAST IN SUMMER. 



21 



the flowers in season set upon his table, — 
morning, we believe, noon, and night ; that is to 
say, at all his meals ; for dinner, in his time, 
was taken at noon ; and why should he not 
have flowers at all his meals, seeing that they 
were growing all day ? Now here is a fashion 
that shall last you for ever, if you please ; never 
changing with silks, and velvets, and silver 
forks, nor dependent upon the caprice of some 
fine gentleman or lady, who have nothing but 
caprice and change to give them importance 
and a sensation. The fashion of the garments 
of heaven and earth endures for ever, and you 
may adorn your table with specimens of their 
drapery, — with flowers out of the fields, and 
golden beams out of the blue ether. 

Flowers on a morning table are specially 
suitable to the time. They look like the happy 
wakening of the creation ; they bring the per- 
fumes of the breath of nature into your room ; 
they seem the representations and embodiments 
of the very smiles of your home, the graces of 
its good-morrow, proofs that some intellectual 
beauty is in ourselves, or those about us ; some 
house Aurora (if we are so lucky as to have 
such a companion) helping to strew our life with 
sweets, or in ourselves some masculine mildness 
not unworthy to possess such a companion, or 
unlikely to gain her. 

Even a few leaves, if we can get no flowers, 
are far better than no such ornament, — a branch 
from the next tree, or the next herb-market, 
or some twigs that have been plucked from a 
flowering hedge. They are often, nay always, 
beautiful, particularly in spring, when their 
green is tenderest. The first, new boughs in 
spring, plucked and put into a water-bottle, 
have often an effect that may compete with 
flowers themselves, considering their novelty ; 
and indeed 

Leaves would be counted flowers, if earth had none. 

(There is a verse for the reader, and not a bad 
one, considering its truth.) We often have 
vines (such as they are, — better than none) 
growing upon the walls of our city houses, — or 
clematis, or jessamine, — perhaps ivy on a bit of 
an old garden-wall, or a tree in a court. We 
should pluck a sprig of it, and plant it on our 
breakfast table. It would show that the cheap 
elegancies of earth, the universal gifts of the 
beauty of nature, are not thrown away upon 
us. They shadow prettily over the clean 
table-cloth or the pastoral milk, like a piece of 
nature brought in-doors. The tender bodies 
of the young vernal shoots above-mentioned, 
put into water, might be almost fancied clus- 
tering together with a sort of virgin delicacy, 
like young nymphs, mute-struck, in a fountain. 
Nay, any leaves, not quite faded, look well, as 
a substitute for the want of flowers, — those of 
the common elm, or the plane, or the rough oak, 
especially when it has become gentle with its 
acorn tassels, or the lime, which is tasseled in a 



more flowery manner, and has a breath as 
beautiful. Ivy, which is seldom or never 
brought in-doors, greatly deserves to be better 
treated, especially the young shoots of it, which 
point in a most elegant manner over the margin 
of a glass or decanter, seeming to have been 
newly scissared forth by some fairy hand, or 
by its own invisible quaint spirit, as if conscious 
of the tendency within it. Even the green tips 
of the fir-trees, which seem to have been brushed 
by the golden pencil of the sun, when he re- 
sumes his painting, bring a sort of light and 
vernal joy into a room, in default of brighter 
visitors. But it is not necessary to a loving 
and reflecting spirit to have anything so good 
as those. A bit of elm-tree or poplar would do, 
in the absence of anything rarer. For our 
parts, as far as ourself alone is concerned, it 
seems to us that we could not be mastered by 
the blackest storm of existence, in the worst 
pass that our pilgrimage could bring us to, as 
long as we had shelter over our heads, a table 
with bread and a cup of tea upon it, and a 
single one of these green smiles upon the 
board, to show us that good-natured Nature 
was alive. 

Does any reader misgive himself, and fancy 
that to help himself to such comforts as these 
would be " trifling ?" Oh, let him not so con- 
descend to the ignorance of the proud or 
envious. If this were trifling, then was Bacon 
a trifler, then was the great Conde a trifler, and 
the old Republican Ludlow, and all the great 
and good spirits that have loved flowers, and 
Milton's Adam himself, nay, heaven itself ; for 
heaven made these harmless elegancies, and 
blessed them with the universal good-will of 
the wise and innocent. To trifle is not to 
make use of small pleasures for the help and 
refreshment of our duties, but to be incapable 
of that real estimation of either, which enables 
us the better to appreciate and assist both. 
The same mighty energy which whirls the 
earth round the sun, and crashes the heavens 
with thunderbolts, produces the lilies of the 
valley, and the gentle dew-drops that keep 
them fair. 

To return then to our flowers and our break- 
fast-table, — were time and place so cruel as not 
to grant us even a twig, still there is a last 
resource, and a rich one too, — not quite so 
cheap as the other, but obtainable now-a-days 
by a few pence, and which may be said to 
grow also on the public walls, — a book. We 
read, in old stories, of enchanters who drew 
gardens out of snow, and of tents no bigger 
than a nut-shell, which opened out over a whole 
army. Of a like nature is the magic of a book, — 
a casket, from which you may draw out, at will, 
bowers to sit under, and affectionate beauties 
to sit by, and have trees, flowers, and an exqui- 
site friend, all at one spell. We see it now 
before us, standing among the cups, edgeways, 
plain-looking, perhaps poor and battered, per- 



22 



BREAKFAST CONTINUED.— TEA-DRINKING. 



haps bought of some dull huckster in a lane 
for a few pence. On its back we read, in old 
worn-out letters of enchantment, the word 
"Milton;" and upon opening it, lo ! we are 
breakfasting forthwith 

. Betwixt two aged oaks 

On herbs and other country messes 
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses, 

in a place which they call " Allegro." Or the 
word on the back of the casket is " Pope," and 
instantly a beauty in a " neglige" makes break- 
fast for ns, and we have twenty sylphs instead 
of butterflies, tickling the air round about us, 
and comparing colours with the flowers, or 
pouncing upon the crumbs that threaten to fall 
upon her stomacher. Or "Thomson" is the 
magic name ; and a friend still sweeter sits 
beside us, with her eyes on ours, and tells us 
with a pressure on the hand and soft low words, 
that our cup awaits us. Or we cry aloud 
" Theocritus ! " plunging into the sweetest 
depths of the country, and lo ! we breakfast 
down in a thick valley of leaves and brooks 
and the brown summer-time, upon creams and 
honey-combs, the guest of bearded Pan and the 
Nymphs ; while at a distance on his mountain- 
top, poor overgrown Polyphemus, tamed and 
made mild with the terrible sweet face of love, 
which has frightened him with a sense of new 
thoughts, and of changes which cannot be, sits 
overshadowing half of the vineyards below 
him ; and with his brow in tears, blows his 
harsh reeds over the sea. 

Such has been many a breakfast of our own, 
dear readers, with poverty on one side of us, 
and these riches on the other. Such must be 
many of yours ; and as far as the riches are 
concerned, such may be all. — But how is this ? 
We have left out the milk, and the bread, 
and the tea itself! "We must have another 
breakfast with the reader, in order to do them 
justice. 



X.— BREAKFAST CONTINUED.— 

TEA-DRINKING. 

A breakfast-table in the morning, clean 
and white with its table-cloth, coloured with 
the cups and saucers, and glittering with the 
tea-pot, — is it not a cheerful object, reader ? 
And are you not always glad to see it ? 

We know not any inanimate sight more 
pleasant, unless it be a very fine painting, or a 
whole abode snugly pitched ; and even then, 
one of the best things to fancy in it, is the 
morning meal. 

The yellow or mellow-coloured butter, 
(which softens the effect of the other hues,) 
the milk, the bread, the sugar, — all have a 
simple, temperate look, very relishing however 
to a hungry man. Perhaps the morning is 
sunny ; at any rate the day is a new one, and 



the hour its freshest ; we have been invigo- 
rated by sleep ; the sound of the shaken 
canister prepares us for the fragrant beverage 
that is coming ; in a few minutes it is poured 
out ; we quaff the odorous refreshment, per- 
haps chatting with dear kindred, or loving 
and laughing with the " morning faces" of 
children, — or, if alone, reading one of the 
volumes mentioned in our last, and taking tea, 
book, and bread-and-butter all at once, — no 
" inelegant" pleasure, as Sir Walter Scott 
saith of the eating of tarts*. 

Dear reader, male or female (very dear, if 
the latter), do you know how to make good 
tea ? Because if you do not (and we have 
known many otherwise accomplished persons 
fail in that desideratum) here is a recipe for 
you, furnished by a mistress of the art : — 

In the first place, the tea-pot is found by 
experience to be best, when it is made of 
metal. But whether metal or ware, take care 
that it be thoroughly clean, and the water 
thoroughly boiling. There should not be a 
leaf of the stale tea left from the last meal. 
The tests of boiling are various with different 
people ; but there can be no uncertainty, if 
the steam come out of the lid of the kettle ; 
and it is best therefore to be sure of that 
evidence. No good tea can be depended upon 
from an urn, because an urn cannot be kept 
boiling ; and water should never be put upon 
the tea but in a thoroughly and immediately 
boiling state. If it has done boiling, it should 
be made to boil again. Boiling, proportion, and 
attention, are the three magic words of tea- 
making. The water should also be soft, hard 
water being sure to spoil the best tea ; and it 
is advisable to prepare the tea-pot against a 
chill, by letting a small quantity of hot water 
stand in it before you begin ; emptying it out 
of course, when you do so. These premises 
being taken care of, excellent tea may be 
made for one person by putting into the pot 
three teaspoonfuls, and as much water as 
will cover the quantity. Let this stand five 
minutes, and then add as much more as will 
twice fill the cup you are going to use. Leave 
this additional water another five minutes, and 
then, first putting the sugar and milk into the 
cup, pour out the tea ; making sure to put in 
another cup of boiling water directly. 

Of tea made for a party, a spoonful for each 
and one over must be used, taking care never 
to drain the tea-pot, and always to add the 

* In his Life of Dry den. Original edition, p. 86. " Even 
for some time after his connexion with the theatre, we 
learn, from a contemporary, that his dress was plain at 
least, if not mean, and his pleasures moderate, though not 
inelegant. 'I remember,' says a correspondent of the 
Gentleman's Magazine for 1745, 'plain John Dryden, 
before he paid his court with success to the great, in one 
uniform clothing of Norwich-drugget. I bave eat tarts 
with him and Madam Reeve at the Mulberry-gardens, 
when our author advanced to a sword and a Chadreux 
wig.'" 



BREAKFAST CONTINUED.— TEA-DRINKING. 



23 



requisite quantity of boiling water as just 
mentioned. 

The most exquisite tea is not perhaps the 
wholesomest. The more green there is in it, 
certainly the less wholesome it is ; though 
green adds to the palatableness. And drink- 
ing tea very hot is a pernicious custom. Green 
tea and hot tea make up the two causes which 
produce perhaps all the injurious results attri- 
buted to tea-drinking. Their united effects, 
in particular, are sometimes formidable to the 
"nerves," and to persons liable to be kept 
awake at night. Excellent tea may be made, 
by judicious management, of black tea alone ; 
and this is unquestionably the most wholesome. 
Yet a little green is hardly to be omitted. 

Now have a cup of tea thus well made, and 
you will find it a very different thing from the 
insipid dilution which some call tea, watery at 
the edges, and transparent half way down ; or 
the syrup into which some convert their tea, 
who are no tea-drinkers, but should take 
treacle for their breakfast ; or the mere 
strength of tea, without any due qualification 
from other materials, — a thing no better than 
melted tea-leaves, or than those which it is 
said were actually served up at dinner, like 
greens, when tea was first got hold of by 
people in remote country parts, who had not 
heard of the way of using it, — a dish of acrid 
bitterness. In tea, properly so called, you 
should slightly taste the sugar, be sensible of 
a balmy softness in the milk, and enjoy at once 
a solidity, a delicacy, a relish, and a fragrance 
in the tea. Thus compounded, it is at once a 
refreshment and an elegance, and, we believe, 
the most innocent of cordials ; for we think 
we can say from experience, that when tea 
does harm, it is either from the unmitigated 
strength just mentioned, or from its being 
taken too hot, — a common and most pernicious 
custom. The inside of a man, dear people, is 
not a kitchen copper. 

But good tea, many of you may say, is dear. 
Tea of all sorts is a great deal too dear ; but 
we have known very costly tea turn out poor 
in the drinking, and comparatively poor tea 
become precious. Out of very bad tea it is per- 
haps impossible to make a good cup ; but skill 
and patience are famous for converting ordi- 
nary materials into something valuable. And 
it should be added, that it is better to have 
one cup of good tea, than half-a-dozen of bad. 
Nevertheless we are not for despising the 
worst of all, if the drinker finds any kind of 
refreshment in it, and can procure no better. 
The very names of tea and tea-time are worth 
something. 

And this brings us to an association of ideas, 
which, however common with us at the break- 
fast-table, and doubtless with hundreds of 
other people, we never experience without 
finding them amusing. We allude to China 
and the Chinese. The very word tea, so petty, 



so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive 
somehow or other of something inexpressibly 
minute and satisfied with a little (tee /), resem- 
bles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken 
one) of that extraordinary people, of whom 
Europeans know little or nothing, except that 
they sell us this preparation, bow back again 
our ambassadors, have a language consisting 
only of a few hundred words, gave us China- 
ware and the strange pictures on our tea-cups, 
made a certain progress in civilisation long 
before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and 
would go no further, and, if numbers, and the 
customs of " venerable ancestors," are to carry 
the day, are at once the most populous and the 
most respectable nation on the face of the 
earth. As a population, they certainly are a 
most enormous and wonderful body ; but, as 
individuals, their ceremonies, their trifling 
edicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their 
tea-cup representations of themselves (which 
are the only ones popularly known) impress 
us irresistibly with a fancy, that they are a 
people all toddling, little- eyed, little-footed, 
little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overween- 
ing, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or 
pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and 
temples with bells at every corner and story, 
and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over 
"nine-inch bridges," with little mysteries of 
bell-hung whips in their hands, — a boat, or a 
house, or a tree made of a pattern, being over 
their heads or underneath them (as the case 
may happen), and a bird as large as the boat, 
always having a circular white space to fly 
in. Such are the Chinese of the tea-cups 
and the grocers' windows, and partly of their 
own novels too, in which everything seems as 
little as their eyes, little odes, little wine-parties, 
and a series of little satisfactions. However, 
it must be owned, that from these novels one 
gradually acquires a notion that there is a 
great deal more good sense and even good 
poetry among them, than one had fancied from 
the accounts of embassies and the autobio- 
graphical paintings on the China-ware ; and 
this is the most probable supposition. An 
ancient and great nation, as civilised as they, 
is not likely to be so much behind-hand with 
us in the art of living, as our self-complacency 
leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us 
amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a 
greater share of barbarism than we suspect in 
our scorn of them. 

At all events, it becomes us to be grateful 
for their tea. "What a curious thing it was, 
that all of a sudden the remotest nation of 
the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to 
all our habits, should convey to us a domestic 
custom, which changed the face of our morn- 
ing refreshments ; and that, instead of ale and 
meat, or wine, all the polite part of England 
should be drinking a Chinese infusion, and 
setting up earthen- ware in their houses, painted 



24 



BREAKFAST CONTINUED.— TEA-DRINKING. 



with preposterous scenery ! "We shall not speak 
contemptuously, for our parts, of any such 
changes in the history of a nation's habits, any 
more than of the changes of the wind, which 
now comes from the west, and now from the 
east, doubtless for some good purpose. It 
may be noted, that the introduction of tea- 
drinking followed the diffusion of books among 
us, and the growth of more sedentary modes 
of life. The breakfasters upon cold beef and 
" cool tankards," were an active, horse-riding 
generation. Tea-drinking times are more 
in-door, given to reading, and are riders in 
carriages, or manufacturers at the loom or the 
steam-engine. It may be taken as an axiom, 
— the more sedentary, the more tea-drinking. 
The conjunction is not the best in the world ; 
but it is natural, till something better be found. 
Tea-drinking is better than dram-drinking : a 
practice which, if our memory does not deceive 
us, was creeping in among the politest and 
even the fairest circles, during the transition 
from ales to teas. "When the late Mr. Hazlitt, 
by an effort worthy of him, suddenly left off 
the stiff glasses of brandy-and- water, by which 
he had been tempted to prop up his disappoint- 
ments, or rather to loosen his tongue at the 
pleasant hour of supper, he took to tea-drink- 
ing ; and it must be owned, was latterly tempted 
to make himself as much amends as he could 
for his loss of excitement, in the quantity he 
allowed himself ; but it left his mind free to 
exercise its powers ; — it " kept," as Waller 
beautifully says of it, 

" The palace of the soul serene ; " 

not, to be sure, the quantity, but the tea itself, 
compared with the other drink. The prince 
of tea-drinkers was Dr. Johnson, one of the 
most sedentary of men, and the most unhealthy. 
It is to be feared his quantity suited him still 
worse ; though the cups, of which we hear such 
multitudinous stories about him, were very 
small in his time. It was he that wrote, or 
rather effused, the humorous request for tea, 
in ridicule of the style of the old ballads 
(things, be it said without irreverence, which 
he did not understand so well as " his cups "). 
The verses were extempore, and addressed to 
Mrs. Thrale :— 

And now, I pray thee, Hetty dear, 

That thou wilt give to me, 
With cream and sugar soften'd well, 

Another dish of tea. 

But hear, alas ! this mournful truth, 

Nor hear it with a frown, — 
Thou canst not make the tea so fast, 

As I can gulp it down. 

Now this is among the pleasures of reading 
and reflecting men over their breakfast, or on 
any other occasion. The sight of what is a 
tiresome nothing to others, shall suggest to 
them a hundred agreeable recollections and 
speculations. There is a tea-cup, for example. 



" Well, what is a tea-cup !" a simpleton might 
cry; — "it holds my tea — that's all." Yes, 
that's all to you and your poverty-stricken 
brain ; we hope you are rich and prosperous, 
to make up for it as well as you can. But to 
the right tea-drinker, the cup, we see, contains 
not only recollections of eminent brethren of 
the bohea, but the whole Chinese nation, with 
all its history, Lord Macartney included ; nay, 
for that matter, Ariosto and his beautiful 
story of Angelica and Medoro ; for Angelica 
was a Chinese ; and then collaterally come in, 
the Chinese neighbours and conquerors from 
Tartary, with Chaucer's 

—Story of Cambuscan bold, 

and the travels of Marco Polo and others, and 
the Jesuit missionaries, and the Japanese with 
our friend Golownin, and the Loo Choo people, 
and Confucius, whom Voltaire (to show his 
learning) delights to call by his proper native 
appellation of Kong-foo-tsee (reminding us of 
Congo tea) ; and then we have the Chinese 
Tales, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, 
and Goldsmith brings you back to Johnson 
again and the tea-drinkings of old times ; and 
then we have the Rape of the Lock before us 
with Belinda at breakfast, and Lady Wortley 
Montague's tea-table eclogue, and the domestic 
pictures in the Tatler and Spectator, with the 
passions existing in those times for china-ware, 
and Horace Walpole, who was an old woman 
in that respect ; and, in short, a thousand other 
memories, grave and gay,poetical and prosaical, 
all ready to wait upon anybody who chooses to 
read books, like spirits at the command of the 
book-readers of old, who, for the advantages 
they had over the rest of the world, got the 
title of Magicians. 

Yea, pleasant and rich is thy sight, little tea- 
cup (large though, at breakfast) round, smooth, 
and coloured ; — composed of delicate earth, — 
like the earth, producing flowers, and birds, 
and men ; and containing within thee thy 
Lilliputian ocean, which we, after sending our 
fancy sailing over it, past islands of foam called 
" sixpences," and mysterious bubbles from 
below, will, giant-like, engulf ; — 

But hold — there's a fly in. 

Now why could not this inconsiderate 
monster of the air be content with the whole 
space of the heavens round about him, but he 
must needs plunge into this scalding pool ? 
Did he scent the sugar ? or was it a fascination 
of terror from the heat? "Hadst thou my 
three kingdoms to range in," said James the 
First to a fly, " and yet must needs get into 
my eye V It was a good-natured speech, and a 
natural. It shows that the monarch did his 
best to get the fly out again ; at least we hope 
so ; and therefore we follow the royal example 
in extricating the little winged wretch, who 
has struggled hard with his unavailing pinions, 
and become drenched and lax with the soaking. 



BREAKFAST CONCLUDED.— TEA, COFFEE, &c. 



25 



He is on the dry clean cloth. Is he dead ? 
No : — the tea was not so hot as we supposed 
it : — see, he gives a heave of himself forward ; 
then endeavours to drag a leg up, then an- 
other, then stops, and sinks down, saturated 
and overborne with wateriness ; and assuredly, 
from the inmost soul of him, he sighs (if flies 
sigh, — which we think they must do sometimes, 
after attempting in vain, for half-an-hour, to 
get through a pane of glass). However, his 
sigh is as much mixed with joy, as fright and 
astonishment and a horrible hot bath cau let 
it be ; and the heat has not been too much for 
him ; a similar case would have been worse 
for one of us with our fleshy bodies ; — for see ! 
after dragging himself along the dry cloth, he 
is fairly on his legs ; he smoothes himself, like 
a cat, first one side, then the other, only with 
his legs instead of his tongue ; then rubs the 
legs together, partly to disengage them of their 
burthen, and partly as if he congratulated 
himself on his escape ; and now, finally, open- 
ing his wings (beautiful privilege ! for all 
wings, except the bat's, seem beautiful, and a 
privilege, and fit for envy) he is off again into 
the air, as if nothing had happened. 

He may forget it, being an inconsiderate 
and giddy fly ; but it is to us, be it remembered 
by our conscience, that he owes all which he 
is hereafter to enjoy. His suctions of sugar, 
his flights, his dances on the window, his 
children, yea, the whole House of Fly, as far 
as it depends on him their ancestor, will be 
owing to us. We have been his providence, 
his guardian angel, the invisible being that 
rescued him without his knowing it. What 
shall we add, reader ? Wilt thou laugh, or 
look placid and content, — humble, and yet in 
some sort proud withal, and not consider it as 
an unbecoming meeting of ideas in these our 
most mixed and reflective papers, — if we argue 
from rescued flies to rescued human beings, 
and take occassion to hope, that in the midst 
of the struggling endeavours of such of us as 
have to wrestle with fault or misfortune, 
invisible pity may look down with a helping 
eye upon ourselves, and that what it is humane 
to do in the man, it is divine to do in that 
which made humanity. 



XI.— BREAKFAST CONCLUDED. 

TEA, AND COFFEE, MILK, BREAD, &C 

We have said nothing of coffee and choco- 
late at breakfast, though a good example has 
been set us in that respect in the pleasant 
pages of Mr. DTsraeli. We confined ourselves 
to tea, because it is the staple drink. A 
cheap coffee, however, or imitation of it, has 
taken place of tea with many ; and the poor 
have now their " coffee houses," as the rich 
used to have. We say " used," because coffee- 
drinking in such places among the rich is fast 



going out, in consequence of the later hours of 
dinner and the attractions of the club-houses. 
Coffee, like tea, used to form a refreshment by 
itself, some hours after dinner. It is now taken 
as a digester, right upon that meal or the wine ; 
and sometimes does not even close it ; for the 
digester itself is digested by a liqueur of sohie 
sort, called a chasse-cafe (coffee-chaser.) We 
do not, however, pretend to be learned in these 
matters. If we find ourselves at a rich table, 
it is but as a stranger in the land, to all but its 
humanities. A custom may change next year, 
and find us as ignorant of it, as the footman is 
otherwise*. 

As we claim the familiar intimacy of the 
reader in this our most private-public miscellany, 
and have had it cordially responded to by fair 
and brown (who will not cry out as a critic did 
against Montaigne, for saying he liked sherry, 
" Who the devil cares whether he liked sherry 
or not ? "), we shall venture to observe in com- 
ment upon the thousand inaudible remarks on 
this question which we hear on all sides of us, 
that for our parts we like coffee better than 
tea, for the taste, but tea " for a constancy." 
And one after the other makes a "pretty" 
variety (as Dr. Johnson, or Mr. Pepys, would 
phrase it). To be perfect in point of relish (we 
do not say of wholesomeness) coffee should be 
strong, and hot, with little sugar and milk. In 
the East they drink it without either ; which, 
we should think, must be intolerable to any 
palates that do not begin with it in childhood, 
or are not in want of as severe stimulants as 
those of sailors (though by the way, we under- 
stand that tobacco-chewing is coming into 
fashion !) It has been drunk after this mode in 
some parts of Europe ; but the public have 
nowhere (we believe) adopted it. The favourite 
way of taking it as a meal, abroad, is with a 
great superfluity of milk, — very properly called 
in France, Cafe-au-lait, Coffee to the milk. One 
of the pleasures we receive in drinking coffee is, 
that, being the universal drink in the East, 
it reminds of that region of the Arabian 
Nights ; as smoking does, for the same reason : 
though neither of these refreshments, which 
are now identified with Oriental manners, is to 
be found in that enchanting work. They had 
not been discovered when it was written. The 
drink was sherbet, and its accompaniments 
cakes and fruit. One can hardly fancy, what 
a Turk or a Persian could have done without 
coffee and a pipe, any more than the English 
ladies and gentlemen before the civil wars, 



* We advert to the knowledge of this personage, out of 
no undue feeling either towards himself, or those whom 
he serves. Both classes comprise natures of all sorts like 
others. But fashion, in itself, is a poor business, everlast- 
ingly shifting its customs because it has nothing but 
change to go upon ; and with all our respect for good 
people who wear its liveries, whether master or footman, 
we own we have no sort of veneration for the phases of 
neckcloths and coats, and the vicissitudes of the modes of 
dining. 



2fi 



BREAKFAST CONCLUDED.— TEA, COFFEE, &c. 



without tea for breakfast. As for chocolate, 
its richness, if made good, renders it rather a 
food than a drink. Linnseus seems to have 
been fond of it ; for it was he, we believe, who 
gave it its generic name of Theobroma, or food 
of the gods. It is said to be extremely nourish- 
ing*, but heavy for weak stomachs. Cocoa 
(cacao) is a lighter kind of it, made of the shell 
instead of the nut. They make German flutes of 
the wood of the chocolate-tree. An Italian wit 
who flourished when tea, coffee, and chocolate 
had not long been introduced into his country, 
treats them all three with great contempt, and 
no less humour ; — 

Non fia gia, che il Cioccolatte 

V'adoprassi, ovvero il Te : 

Medicine cosi fatte 

Non saran giammai per me. 

Beverei prima il veleno, 

Che un bicchier che fosse pieno 

Del amaro e reo Caffe. 

Cola tra gli Arabi 

E tra i Giannizzeri 

Liquor si ostico, 

Si nero e torbido, 

Gli sehiavi ingollino. 

Giii nel Tartaro, 

Giu nell' Erebo, 

L'empie Belidi l'inventarono. 

E Tesifone, e l'altre Furie, 

A Proserpina il ministrarono. 

E se in Asia il Musulmanno 

Se lo cionca a precipizio, 

Mostra aver poco giudizio. 

redi. Bacco in Toscana. 

Talk of Chocolate ! Talk of Tea ! 

Medicines made, ye Gods, as they are, 

Are no medicines made for me ! 

I would sooner take to poison 

Than a single cup set eyes on 

Of that bitter and guilty stuff ye 

Talk of by the name of Coffee. 

Let the Arabs and the Turks 

Count it 'mongst their cruel works. 

Foe of mankind, black and turbid, 

Let the throats of slaves absorb it. 

Down in Tartarus, 

Down in Erebus, 

'Twas the detestable Fiftyf invented it ; 

The Furies then took it, 

To grind and to cook it, 

And to Proserpina all three presented it. 

If the Mussulman in Asia 

Doats on a beverage so unseemly, 

I differ with the man extremely. 

These vituperations, however, are put into the 
mouth of the god of wine ; who may justly 
have resented the introduction of 

" the cups 
Which cheer but not inebriate." 

* " An acquaintance, on whose veracity we can rely," 
says Mr. Phillips, in his History of Fruits, " informed us, 
that during the retreat of Napoleon's army from the North 
he fortunately had a small quantity of little chocolate 
cakes in his pocket, which preserved the lifeof himself and 
a friend for several days, when they could procure no 
other food whatever, and many of their brother officers 
perished for want." — Pomarium Britannicum, or His- 
torical and Botanical Account of Fruits known in Great 
Britain. Third Edition, p. 67. Colburn. 

t The daughters of Danaus, who killed their husbands. 



Chocolate is a common refreshment in Italy, in 
a solid shape. The pastry-cooks sell sweet- 
meats of it, wrapped up in little papers with 
printed mottos, containing some couplet of 
humour or gallantry. They have made their 
appearance of late years in England, owing, we 
believe, to the patronage of George the Fourth, 
who is said to have given an order to a Paris 
manufacturer, to the value of £500. 

Off, ye inferior goods, ye comparative sophis- 
tications, perhaps fleeting fashions, and let us 
bethink ourselves of the everlasting virtues of 
beautiful milk and bread ! 

"Milk," says a venerable text, "is fit for 
children." It is too • often unfit for men, not 
because their stomachs are stronger than those 
of children, but because they are weaker. 
Causes of various sorts, sorrow, too much think- 
ing, dissipation, shall render a man unable to 
digest the good wholesome milk-bowl, that de- 
lighted him when a child. He must content 
himself with his experience, and with turning 
it to the best account, especially for others. A 
child over a milk-bowl is a pleasant object. 
He seems to belong to everything that is young 
and innocent, — the morning, the fields, the 
dairies. And no fear of indigestion has he, nor 
of a spoiled complexion. He does not sit up 
till twelve at night ; nor is a beauty tight-lacing 
herself; nor does he suspend his stomach in 
breathlessness, with writing "articles," and 
thinking of good and evil. 

Pleasant object also, nevertheless, is the 
milk-jug to the grown man, whether sick or 
well, provided he have " an eye." White milk 
in a white jug, or cream in a cream-coloured, 
presents one of these sympathies of colour, 
which are sometimes of higher taste than any 
contrast, however delicate. Drummond of 
Hawthornden has hit it, with a relishing 
pencil : — 

In petticoat of green 

With hair about her eine*, 

Phillis, beneath an oak, 

Sat milking her fair flock : 

'Mongst that sweet-strained moisture (rare delight) 

Her hand seem'd milk, in milk it was so whitef, 

Anacreon beautifully compares a finely tinted 
cheek, to milk with roses in it. There is a 
richness of colouring, as well as of substance, 
in the happy scriptural designation of an abun- 
dant country, — " A land overflowing with milk 
and honey." Milk and honey suit admirably 
on the breakfast table. Their colours, their 
simplicity, their country associations, all har- 
monise. We have a dairy and a bee-hive 
before us, — the breath of cows, and the buzzing 
over the garden. By the way there is a very 
pretty design in Cooke's edition of ParnelPs 
Poems, of a girl milking a cow, by Kirk, a 
young Scotch artist of great promise, who died 

* Eine—een— Scotch and old English for eyes. 
f See Cunningham's edition of Drummond, lately pub- 
lished, p. 249. 



BREAKFAST CONCLUDED.— TEA, COFFEE, &c. 



27 



prematurely, which has wandered to the tea- 
cups, and is to be found on some of the cheapest 
of them. We happened to meet with it in 
Italy, and felt all our old landscapes before us, 
— the meadows, the trees, and the village 
church ; all which the artist has put into the 
back-ground. The face is not quite so good on 
the tea-cup as in the engraving. In that, it is 
eminently beautiful, — at least in the work now 
before us. We cannot answer for re-prints. 
It is one of those faces of sweetness and natural 
refinement, which are to be met with in the 
humblest as well as highest classes, where the 
parentage has been genial, and the bringing up 
not discordant. The passage illustrated is the 
pretty exordium of the poet's Eclogue entitled 
Health :— 

Now early shepherds o'er the meadow pass, 
And print long footsteps in the glittering grass : 
The cows neglectful of their pasture stand, 
By turns obsequious to the milker's hand. 

Is it not better to occupy the fancy with 
such recollections as these over a common 
breakfast, than to be lamenting that we have 
not an uncommon one ? which perhaps also 
would do us a mischief, and for the gain of a 
little tickling of the palate take health and 
good temper out of us for the rest of the day. 
Besides, a palate unspoilt has a relish of milks 
and teas, and other simple foods, which a 
Nabob, hot from his mulligatawny and his 
megrims, would envy. 

We look upon it as a blessing, for our parts, 
that we retain a liking for a very crust. We 
were educated at a school, where the food was 
poorer than the learning ; but the monks had 
lived in its cloisters, and left us a spring of de- 
licious water. Hence we have the pleasure of 
enjoying a crust of bread and a draught of 
water to this day. Oftentimes have we a spoilt 
our dinner," when it has not come up in time, 
with a " hunk " of bread, choosing rather to 
spoil our dinner than our spirits : and sweet 
have been those mouthfuls of the pure staff of 
life, and relishing of the corn. To our appre- 
hensions there is a sort of white taste in bread, 
analogous to the colour, and reminding us of 
the white milkiness of the wheat. We have a 
respect, both of self-love and sympathy, with 
the poor light-hearted player in Gil Bias, who 
went singing along the country road, dipping 
his crust in the stream. Sorrow had no hold 
on him, with ninety-nine out of her hundred 
arms. Carelessly along went he, safe from her 
worst handling, in his freedom from wants. She 
might have peered out of her old den, and 
grown softened at his chant. But he went 
alone too : he had none to care for ; which 
was a pleasure also. It would be none to us, 
— one thing provided. There are pains, when 
you get heartily acquainted with them, which 
out-value the reverse pleasures. Besides, we 
must all get through our tasks, as manfully and 
cheerfully as we can ; losing, if possible, no 



handsome pleasure by the way, and sustaining 
ourselves by the thought that all will be for 
the best, provided we do our best for all. It 
is not the existence of pain that spoils the 
relish of the world ; but the not knowing how 
to make the most of pleasures, and thereby 
reducing the pains to their most reasonable 
size and their most useful account. 

You may make a landscape, if you will, out 
of your breakfast-table, better than Mr. Kirk's 
picture. Here where the bread stands, is its 
father, the field of corn, glowing in the sun, 
cut by the tawny reapers, and presenting a path 
for lovers. The village-church (where they 
are to be married) is on a leafy slope on one 
side ; and on the other is a woody hill, with 
fountains. There, far over the water, (for this 
basin of water, with island lumps of butter in 
it, shall be a sea) are our friends the Chinese, 
picking the leaves of their tea-trees, — a beau- 
tiful plant ; or the Arabs plucking the berries 
of the coffee-tree, a still more beautiful one, 
with a profusion of white blossoms, and an 
odour like jessamine. For the sugar (instead 
of a bitterer thought, not so harmonious to our 
purpose, but not to be forgotten at due times) 
you may think of Waller's Saccharissa*, so 
named from the Latin word for sugar (saccha- 
rum) a poor compliment to the lady ; but the 
lady shall sweeten the sugar, instead of the 
sugar doing honour to the lady ; and she was 
a very knowing as well as beautiful woman, 
and saw farther into love and sweetness than 
the sophisticate court poet ; so she would not 
have him notwithstanding his sugary verses, 
but married a higher nature. 

Bread, milk, and butter are of venerable 
antiquity. They taste of the morning of the 
world. Jael, to entertain her guest, " brought 
forth butter in a lordly dish." Homer speaks 
of a nation of milk-eaters, whom he calls the 
"justest of men." To "break bread" was 
from time immemorial the Eastern signal of 
hospitality and confidence. We need not add 
reasons for respecting it, still more reverend. 
Bread is the " staff of life " throughout the 
greater part of the civilised world ; and so 
accordant is its taste with the human palate, 
that nature, in some places, seems to have 
grown it ready-made on purpose, in the shape 
of the Bread Fruit Tree. There is also a milk- 
tree ; but we nowhere find a carniferous, or 
flesh-bearing tree ; nor has the city yet been 

* Saccharissa was Lady Dorothy Sidney, of the great and 
truly noble family of the Sidneys. She married a sincere, 
affectionate, and courageous man, Robert Spencer, Earl of 
Sunderland, who was killed four years afterwards, in a 
cause for which he thought himself bound to quit the arms 
of the woman he loved. Her second husband was of the 
Smythe family. In her old age, meeting Waller at a card- 
table, Lady Sunderland asked him, in good-humoured and 
not ungrateful recollection of his fine verses, when he 
would write any more such upon her; to which the 
" polite " poet, either from spite or want of address, had the 
poverty of spirit to reply, " Oh, madam ! when your lady- 
ship is as young again." 



28 



ANACREON. 



discovered in which " the pigs run through the 
streets ready roasted, with knives and forks 
stuck in their sides." Civilised nations eat 
meat, but they can also do without it, living 
upon milk, grain, and vegetables alone, as in 
India. None but savages live without those. 
And common breakfasts, without any meat in 
them, have this advantage over others, that 
you can recollect them without any sort 
of doubt or disgust ; nor are their leavings 
offensive to the eye. It is one of the perplex- 
ities of man's present condition, that he is at 
once carnivorous, and has very good reason 
for being so, and relishing his chop and his 
steak, and yet cannot always reconcile it to 
the rest of his nature. He would fain eat his 
lamb, and pity it too ; which is puzzling. 
However, there are worse perplexities than 
these ; and the lambs lead pleasant flowery 
lives while they do live. Nor could they have 
had this taste of existence, if they were not 
bred for the table. Let us all do our best to 
get the world forward, and we shall see. We 
shall either do away all we think wrong, or see 
better reasons for thinking it right. Mean- 
while, let us dine and breakfast, like good- 
humoured people ; and not " quarrel with our 
bread and butter." 



XII.— ANACREON. 

It has been said of ladies when they write 
letters, that they put their minds in their post- 
scripts — let out the real object of their writing, 
as if it were a second thought, or a thing com- 
paratively indifferent. You very often know 
the amount of a man's knowledge of an author 
by the remark he makes on him, after he has 
made the one which he thinks proper and 
authorised. As for example, you will mention 
Anacreon to your friend A. in a tone which 
implies that you wish to know his opinion of 
him, and he shall say — 

"Delightful poet, Anacreon — breathes the 
very spirit of love and wine. His Greek is very 
easy." 

All the real opinion of this gentleman 
respecting Anacreon lies in what he says in 
these last words. His Greek is easy ; that is, 
our scholar has had less trouble in learning to 
read him than with other Greek poets. This 
is all he really thinks or feels about the "de- 
lightful Anacreon." 

So with B. You imply a question to B. in 
the same tone, and he answers, " Anacreon ! 
Oh ! a most delightful poet Anacreon — charm- 
ing — all love and wine. The best edition of Mm 
is SpalettVsr 

This is all that B. knows of Anacreon's " love 
and wine." "The best edition of it is Spa- 
letti's;" that is to say, Spaletti is the Anacreon 
wine-merchant most in repute. 



So again with C. as to his knowledge of the 
translations of the " delightful poet." 

" Translations of Anacreon ! Delightful poet 
— too delightful, too natural and peculiar to be 
translated — simplicity — naivete — Fawkes's 
translation is elegant — Moore's very elegant 
but diffuse. — Nobody can translate Anacreon. 
Impossible to give any idea of the exquisite 
simplicity of the Greek." 

This gentleman has never read Cowley's 
translations from Anacreon ; and if he had, he 
would not have known which part of them 
was truly Anacreontic and which not. He 
makes up his mind that it is impossible to give 
" any idea of the exquisite simplicity of the 
Greek ;" meaning, by that assertion, that he 
himself cannot, and therefore nobody else can. 
His sole idea of Anacreon is, that he is a writer 
famous for certain beauties which it is impos- 
sible to translate. As to supposing that the 
spirit of Anacreon may occasionally be met 
with in poets who have not translated him, and 
that you may thus get an idea of him without 
recurring to the Greek at all, this is what 
never entered his head : for Nature has nothing 
to do with his head ; it is only books and 
translations. Love, nature, myrtles, roses, 
wine, have existed ever since the days of 
Anacreon ; yet he thinks nobody ever chanced 
to look at these things with the same eyes. 

Thus there is one class of scholars who have 
no idea of Anacreon except that he is easy to 
read ; another, who confine their notions of 
him to a particular edition ; and a third, who 
look upon him as consisting in a certain ele- 
gant impossibility to translate. There are 
more absurdities of pretended scholarship, on 
this and all other writers, which the truly 
learned laugh at, and know to be no scholar- 
ship at all. Our present business is to attempt 
to give some idea of what they think and 
feel with regard to Anacreon, and what 
all intelligent men would think and feel, if 
they understood Greek terms for natural im- 
pressions. To be unaffectedly charmed with 
the loveliness of a cheek, and the beauty of a 
flower, are the first steps to a knowledge of 
Anacreon. Those are the grammar of his 
Greek, and pretty nearly the dictionary too. 

Little is known of the life of Anacreon. 
There is reason to believe that he was born 
among the richer classes ; that he was a visitor 
at the courts of princes ; and that, agreeably to 
a genius which was great enough and has 
given enough delight to the world, to warrant 
such a devotion of itself to its enjoyments, he 
kept aloof from the troubles of his time, or 
made the best of them, and tempted them to 
spare his door. It may be concluded of him, 
that his existence (so to speak)was passed in a 
garden ; for he lived to be old ; which in a man 
of his sensibility and indolence, implies a life 
pretty free from care. It is said that he died at 
the age of eighty-five, and was then choked with 



ANACREON. 



29 



a grape-stone ; a fate generally thought to be a 
little too allegorical to be likely. He was born 
on the coast of Ionia (part of the modern Tur- 
key), at Teos, a town south of Smyrna, in the 
midst of a country of wine, oil, and sunshine; 
and thus partook strongly of those influences 
of climate which undoubtedly occasion varieties 
in genius, as in other productions of nature. 
As to the objectionable parts of his morals, 
they belonged to his age, and have no essential 
or inseparable connexion with his poetry. We 
are therefore glad to be warranted in saying 
nothing about them. All the objectionable 
passages might be taken out of Anacreon, and 
he would still be Anacreon ; and the most vir- 
tuous might read him as safely as they read of 
flowers and butterflies. Cowley, one of the best 
of men, translated some of his most Anacreontic 
poems. We profess to breathe his air in the 
same spirit as Cowley, and shall assuredly bring 
no poison out of it to our readers. The truly 
virtuous are as safe in these pages, as they can 
be in their own homes and gardens. But 
cheerfulness is a part of our religion, and we 
choose to omit not even grapes in it, any 
more than nature has omitted them. 

Imagine then a good-humoured old man, 
with silver locks, but a healthy and cheerful 
face, sitting in the delightful climate of Smyrna, 
under his vine or his olive, with his lute by his 
side, a cup of his native wine before him, and 
a pretty peasant girl standing near him, who 
has perhaps brought him a basket of figs, or 
a bottle of milk corked with vine leaves, and 
to whom he is giving a rose, or pretending to 
make love. 

For we are not, with the gross literality of 
dull or vicious understandings, to take for 
granted everything that a poet says on all occa- 
sions, especially when he is old. It is mere 
gratuitous and suspicious assumption in critics 
who tell us, that such men as Anacreon passed 
"whole lives" in the indulgence of "every 
excess and debauchery." They must have had, 
in the first place, prodigious constitutions, if 
they did, to live to be near ninety ; and secondly, 
it does not follow that because a poet speaks 
like a poet, it has therefore taken such a vast 
deal to give him a taste, greater than other 
men's, for what he enjoys. Redi, the author of 
the most famous Bacchanalian poem in Italy, 
drank little but water. St. Evremond, the 
French wit, an epicure professed, was too good 
an epicure not to be temperate and preserve 
his relish. Debauchees, who are fox-hunters, 
live to be old, because they take a great deal 
of exercise; but it is not likely that inactive 
men should; unless they combined a relish 
for pleasure with some very particular kinds of 
temperance. 

There is generally, in Anacreon's earnest, a 

touch of something which is not in earnest, 

— which plays with the subject, as a good- 

i humoured old man plays with children. There 



is a perpetual smile on his face between en- 
thusiasm and levity. He truly likes the objects 
he looks upon (otherwise he could not have 
painted them truly), and he will retain as 
much of his youthful regard for them as he 
can. He does retain much, and he pleasantly 
pretends more. He loves wine, beauty, flowers, 
pictures, sculptures, dances, birds, brooks, kind 
and open natures, everything that can be in- 
dolently enjoyed; not, it must be confessed, 
with the deepest innermost perception of their 
beauty (which is more a characteristic of 
modern poetry than of ancient, owing to the 
difference of their creeds) but with the most 
elegant of material perceptions, — of what lies 
in the surface and tangibility of objects, — and 
with an admirable exemption from whatsoever 
does not belong to them, — from all false taste 
and the mixture of impertinences. With re- 
gard to the rest, he had all the sentiment 
which good-nature implies, and nothing more. 

Upon those two points of luxury and good 
taste, the character of Anacreon, as a poet, 
wholly turns. He is the poet of indolent en- 
joyment, in the best possible taste, and with 
the least possible trouble. He will enjoy as 
much as he can, but he will take no more 
pains about it than he can help, not even to 
praise it. He would probably talk about it, 
half the day long ; for talking would cost him 
nothing, and it is natural to old age ; but 
when he comes to write about it, he will 
say no more than the impulse of the moment 
incites him to put down, and he will say it in 
the very best manner, both because the truth 
of his perception requires it, and because an 
affected style and superfluous words would 
give him trouble. He would, it is true, take 
just so much trouble, if necessary, as should 
make his style completely suitable to his truth ; 
and if his poems were not so short, it would be 
difficult to a modern writer to think that they 
could flow into such excessive ease and spirit 
as they do, if he had not taken the greatest 
pains to make them. But besides his impulses, 
he had the habit of a life upon him. Hence 
the compositions of Anacreon are remarkable 
above all others in the world, for being "short 
and sweet." They are the very thing, and 
nothing more, required by the occasion; for 
the animal spirits, which would be natural in 
other men, and might lead them into super- 
fluities, would not be equally so to one, who 
adds the indolence of old age to the niceties of 
natural taste : and therefore, as people boast, on 
other occasions, of calling things by their right 
names, and "a spade, a spade," so when Ana- 
creon describes a beauty or a banquet, or 
wishes to convey his sense to you of a flower, 
or a grasshopper, or a head of hair, there it is; 
as true and as free from everything foreign to 
it, as the thing itself. 

Look at a myrtle-tree, or a hyacinth, inhale 
its fragrance, admire its leaves or blossom, 



30 



ANACREON. 



then shut your eyes, and think how exqui- 
sitely the myrtle tree is what it is, and how 
beautifully unlike everything else, — how pure 
in simple yet cultivated grace. Such is one of 
the odes of Anacreon. 

This may not be a very scholastic descrip- 
tion ; but we wish it to be something better ; 
and we write to genial apprehensions. We 
would have them conceive a taste of Anacreon, 
as they would that of his grapes ; and know him 
by his flavour. 

It must be conceded to one of our would-be 
scholarly friends above mentioned, that there 
is no translation, not even of any one ode of 
Anacreon's, in the English language, which 
gives you an entirely right notion of it. The 
common-place elegancies of Fawkes (who was 
best when he was humblest, as in his ballad of 
"Dear Tom, this brown jug,") are out of the 
qiiestion. They are as bad as Hoole's Ariosto. 
Mr. Moore's translation is masterly of its kind, 
but its kind is not Anacreon's; as he would, 
perhaps, be the first to say, now ; for it was a 
work of his youth. It is too oriental, diffuse, 
and ornamented ; an Anacreon in Persia. The 
best English translations are those which Cow- 
ley has given us, although diffuseness is their 
fault also; but they have more of Anacreon's 
real animal spirits, and his contentment with 
objects themselves, apart from what he can 
say about them. Cowley is most in earnest. 
He thinks most of what his original was thinking 
and least of what is expected from his translator. 

We will give a specimen of him presently. 
But it is not to be supposed that we have no 
passages in the writings of English poets, that 
convey to an unlearned reader a thorough 
idea of Anacreon. Prose cannot do it, though 
far better sometimes as a translation of verse, 
than verse itself, since the latter may destroy 
the original both in spirit and medium too. 
But prose, as a translation of verse, wants, 
of necessity, that sustained enthusiasm of 
poetry, which presents the perpetual charm 
of a triumph over the obstacle of metre, and 
turns it to an accompaniment and a dance. 
Readers, therefore, must not expect a right 
idea of Anacreon from the best prose versions ; 
though, keeping in mind their inevitable de- 
ficiencies, they may be of great service and 
pleasure to him, especially if he can superadd 
the vivacity which they want. And he is 
pretty sure not to meet in them with any of 
the impertinences of the translations in verse ; 
that is to say (not to use the word offensively) 
any of the matter which does not belong to the 
original ; for an impertinence, in the literal, 
unoffensive sense of the word, signifies that 
which does not belong to, or form a part of, 
anything*. 

The following passage about Cupid bathing 

* The reader will be good enough to bear in mind that 
this paper on Anacreon was originally addressed to the 
uneducated. 



and pruning his wings under the eyes of a 
weeping beauty (the production either of 
Spenser, or of a friend worthy of him) appears 
to us to be thoroughly Anacreontic in one 
respect, and without contradiction ; that is to 
say, in clearness and delicacy of fancy. 

The blinded archer-boy, like larke in shower of raine, 
Sat bathing of his wings ; and glad the time did spend 
Under those cristall drops, which fell from her faire eyes, 
And at their brightest beams, him proyned in lovely wise. 

Milton's address to May-morning would have 
been Anacreontic, but for a certain something 
of heaviness or stateliness which he has min- 
gled with it, and the differential changes of the 
measure. 

Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, 
Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her 
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws 
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose. 

The dancing of the star, the leading flowery 
May, the green lap, and the straightforward 
simple style of the words, are all Anacreontic ; 
but the measure is too stately and serious. The 
poet has instinctively changed it in the lines 
that follow these, which are altogether in the 
taste of our author : 

Hail bounteous May ! that dost inspire 
Mirth, and youth, and warm desire: 
Woods and groves are of thy dressing ; 
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. 

Then a long line comes too seriously in — 

Thus we salute thee with our early song, 
And welcome thee and wish thee long. 

We will here observe by the way, that Ana- 
creon's measures are always short and dancing. 
One of these somewhat resembles the shorter 
ones of the above poem. 

Woods and groves are of thy dressing ; 
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. 

Every syllable, observe, is pronounced. 

Dote moi lyren Homerou 
Phonies aneuthe chordes. 

The o's in the second line of the next are all 
pronounced long, as in the word rose. 

Hyacinthine me rhabdo 
Chalepos Eros badizon 
Ekeleuse syntrochazein. 

There is a poet of the time of Charles the 
First, Herrick, who is generally called, but on 
little grounds, the English Anacreon, though 
he now and then has no unhappy imitation of 
his manner. We wish we had him by us, to 
give a specimen. There is one beautiful song 
of his, (which has been exquisitely translated, 
by the way,into Latin, by one of the nowleading 
political writers,*) the opening measure of 

* See a periodical publication in two volumes called the 
Reflector, which contained some of the first public essays 
of several eminent living writers. 



ANACREON. 



31 



which, that is, of the first couplet, is the same 
as the other common measure of Anacreon : — 

Their eyes the glowworms lend thee, 
The shooting stars attend thee, 

And the elves also, 

Whose little eyes glow 
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. 

He ge melaina pinei, 
Pinei de dendre auten, 
Pinei thalassa d'auras, 
Ho d'Helios thalassan. 

Suckling, a charming off-hand writer, who stood 
between the days of Elizabeth and the Stuarts, 
and partook of the sentiment of the one and 
the levity of the other, would have translated 
Anacreon admirably. And had Anacreon been 
a fine gentleman of the age of Charles the 
First, instead of an ancient Greek, he would 
have written Suckling's ballad on a wedding. 
There is a touch in it, describing a beautiful 
pair of lips, which, though perfectly original, 
is in the highest Anacreontic taste : — 

Her lips were red, and one was thin, 
Compared with that was next her chin, 
Some bee had stung it newly. 

Beauty, the country, a picture, the taste and 
scent of honey, are all in that passage. And 
yet Anacreon, in the happy comprehensiveness 
of his words, has beaten it. The thought has 
become somewhat hackneyed since his time, 
the hard, though unavoidable fate of many an 
exquisite fancy ; yet stated in his simple words, 
and accompanied with an image, the very per- 
fection of eloquence, it may still be read with 
a new delight. In a direction to a painter 
about a portrait of his mistress he tells him to 
give her "a lip like Persuasion's" 

Prokaloumenon philema— 
Provoking a kiss. 

The word is somewhat spoilt in English, by 
the very piquancy which time has added to it ; 
because it makes it look less in earnest, too 
much like the common language of gallantry. 
But provoking literally means calling for — asking 
— forcing us, in common gratitude for our de- 
light, to give what is so exquisitely deserved. 
And in that better sense, the word provoking is 
still the right one. 

Shakespeare's serenade in Cymbeline might 
have been written by Anacreon, except that 
he would have given us some luxurious image 
of a young female, instead of the word "lady." 

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings 

And Phoebus 'gins arise, 
His steeds to water at those springs 

On chaliced flowers that lies, 
And winking mary-buds begin 

To ope their golden eyes : 
With everything that pretty been, 

My lady sweet, arise. 

Lilly, a writer of Shakespeare's age, who per- 
verted a naturally fine genius to the purposes 



of conceit and fashion, has a little poem 
beginning — 

Cupid and my Campaspe played 
At cards for kisses, 

which Anacreon might have written, had cards 
existed in his time. But we have it not by us 
to quote. Many passages in Burns's songs are 
Anacreontic, inasmuch as they are simple, 
enjoying, and full of the elegance of the senses ; 
but they have more passion than the old 
Greek's, and less of his perfection of grace. 
Anacreon never suffers, but from old age, or the 
want of wine. Burns suffers desperately, and 
as desperately struggles with his suffering, till 
we know not which is the greater, he or his 
passion. There is nothing of this robust-handed 
work in the delicate Ionian. Nature is strong 
and sovereign in him, but always in accom- 
modating unison with his indolence and old 
age. He says that he is transported, and he 
is so; but somehow you always fancy him 
in the same place, never quite carried out of 
himself. 

Of Anacreon's drinking songs, we do not 
find it so easy to give a counterpart notion 
from the English poets, who, though of a drink- 
ing country, have not exhibited much of the 
hilarity of wine. Their port is heavy, com- 
pared with Anacreon's Teian. Shakespeare's 

Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne 

will not do at all ; for Anacreon's Bacchus is 
the perfection of elegant mythology, parti- 
cularly comme il faut in the waist, a graceful 
dancer, and beautiful as Cheerfulness. In all 
Anacreon's manners, and turn of thinking, 
you recognise what is called "the gentleman." 
He evidently had a delicate hand. The "cares" 
that he talks about, consisted in his not having 
had cares enough. A turn at the plough, or a 
few wants, would have given him pathos. He 
would not have thought all the cares of life to 
consist in its being short, and swift, and taking 
him away from his pleasures. If he partook 
however of the effeminacy of his caste, he was 
superior to its love of wealth and domination. 
The sole business of his life, he said, was to 
drink and sing, perfume his beard, and crown 
his head with roses ; and he appears to have 
stuck religiously to his profession. "Business," 
he thought, "must be attended to." Plato 
calls him "wise;" as Milton calls the luxu- 
rious Spenser "sage and serious." The great- 
est poets and philosophers sometimes " let the 
cat out of the bag," when they are tired of 
conventional secrets. 

This bottle's the sun of our table, 

His beams are rosy wine ; 
We, planets that are not able 

Without his help to shine. 

These verses of Sheridan's are Anacreontic. 
So is that couplet of Burns's, — exquisitely 



i 32 



THE WRONG SIDES OF SCHOLARSHIP 



so, except for the homeliness of the last 
word : 

Care, mad to see a man so happy, 
E'en drown'd himself amidst the nappy. 

One taste, like this, of the wine of the feelings 
gives a better idea of Anacreon's drinking 
songs than hundreds of ordinary specimens. 

But we must hasten to close this long article 
with the best Anacreontic piece of translation 
we are acquainted with ; — that of the famous 
ode to the Grasshopper, by Cowley. Ana- 
creon's Grasshopper, it is to be observed, is not 
properly a Grasshopper, but the Tettix, as the 
Greeks called it from its cry, — the Cicada of 
the Roman poet, and Cicala of modern Italy, 
where it sings or cricks in the trees in summer- 
time, as the grasshopper does with us in the 
grass. It is a species of beetle. But Cowley 
very properly translated his Greek insect, as 
well as ode, into English, knowing well that 
the poet's object is to be sympathised with, and 
that if Anacreon had written in England, he 
would have addressed the grasshopper instead 
of the tettix. 

We have marked in italics the expressions 
which, though original in Cowley's version, 
are purely Anacreontic, and such as the Gre- 
cian would have delighted to write. The whole 
poem is much longer than Anacreon's, double 
the size ; but this, perhaps, only justly makes 
up for the prolongation afforded to all ancient 
poems, by the music which accompanied them. 
There is not a Cowleian conceit in the whole 
of it, unless the thought about "farmer and 
landlord " be one, which is quickly forgiven for 
its naturalness in an English landscape ; and the 
whole, from beginning to end, though not so 
perfectly melodious, runs on with that natural 
yet regulated and elegant enthusiasm, betwixt 
delight in the object and indolent enjoyment 
in the spectator, which has been noticed as 
characteristic of the sprightly old bard. The 
repetition of the word all is quite in the 
poet's manner ; who loved thus to cram much 
into little, and to pretend to himself that he 
was luxuriously expatiating ; — as in fact he 
was, in his feelings; though, as to compo- 
sition, he did not choose to make " a toil of a 
pleasure." 

Happy insect ! what can be 

In happiness compared to thee ? 

Fed with nourishment divine, 

The dewy morning's gentle wine. 

Nature waits upon thee still, 

And thy verdant cup does fill ; 

Tis fill'd wherever thou dost tread, 

Nature's self thy Ganymede. 

Thou dost drink, and dance, and sing, 

Happier than the happiest king. 

All the fields which thou dost see, 

All the plants belong to thee; 

All that summer hours produce, 

Fertile made with early juice. 

Man for thee does sow and plow, 

Farmer he, and landlord thou ! 

Thou dost innocently joy ; 

Nor does thy luxury destroy ; 



The shepherd gladly heareth thee, 

More harmonious than he. 

Thee country hinds with gladness hear, 

Prophet of the ripen' d year ! 

Phcebus is himself thy sire ; 

Thee Phcebus loves, and does inspire ; 

To thee, of all things upon earth, 

Life is no longer than thy mirth. 

Happy insect! happy thou! 

Dost neither age nor winter know ; 

But when thou'st drunk, and danced, and sung 

Thy fill the flowery leaves among, 

( Voluptuous and wise withal, 

Epicurean animal/) 

Sated with thy summer feast, 

Thou retirest to endless rest. 



XIII.— THE WRONG SIDES OF SCHOLAR- 
SHIP AND NO SCHOLARSHIP. 

There are two supposed (for they are not 
real) extremes of pretension, upon the strange 
question whether a knowledge of the learned 
languages is or is not of use, against which it 
behoves an uneducated man of sense and 
modesty to be on his guard. One is the pre- 
tension of those who say that a man can have 
no idea of the ancient writers, without a deep 
intimacy with their language : the other, of 
those who affirm, with equal vehemence, that 
there is no necessity to know the language at 
all, and that translations do quite as well as 
the originals for giving you all that you need 
be acquainted with of the author's genius. 

The former of these pretenders is generally 
a shallower man than the other, though some- 
times it is pure vanity and self-will that makes 
him talk as he does ; he has an over-estimation 
of his advantages, simply because they are his. 
He is as proud of his learning as another 
pompous man might be of his park and his 
mansion. Such is the case, when he really has 
anything like an intimacy with his authors ; but 
in both instances he would fain make out his 
possession to be unapproachable, by all who 
have not had the same golden key. The 
common run of the class consists of men who 
really know nothing of their authors but the 
words, and who unconsciously feel that, on that 
account, they must make the best of their 
knowledge, and pretend it is a wonderful 
matter. Such a man smiles when you speak 
of getting some insight into the character of 
Homer's genius, or Virgil's, by dint of some 
happy bit of version or some masterly criticism. 
He says, triumphantly, that " even Pope" is 
acknowledged not to give a right idea of him, 
much less Chapman, and those other "old quaint 
writers :" for " old," observe, is a term of con- 
tempt with him ; though " ancient," he thinks, 
comprises everything that is respectable. But 
"old" means a man who lived only a few hundred 
years back, and who did not write either in 
Latin or Greek ; whereas " ancient" means a 
man who lived upwards of a thousand, and 
wrote perhaps a dull book in one of those Ian- 



AND NO SCHOLARSHIP. 



33 



guages, which has contrived to come down to 
us, owing to some curious things it contains 
relative to customs and manners, or to the in- 
fluence of a succession of these sort of critics, 
and the loDg fashion they have kept up by dint 
of the connexion that has hitherto subsisted 
between the power of receiving a classical edu- 
cation and the advantages of wealth and rank. 
When all the world come to share in that educa- 
tion, some singular questions will take place, 
both as to the genius of the ancient writers, and 
the moral benefits derivable from portions of 
them. If our friend, of the above class, is a man 
of consequence, he looks upon his learning as 
forming an additional barrier between him and 
the uneducated. He quotes Greek in parlia- 
ment, and takes it for an argument. Or he for- 
gets both his Greek and Latin,but thinks he could 
recover it when he pleased, and that is the same 
thing. If he is a professed scholar, he is igno- 
rant of everything in the world but scholarship, 
and therefore ignorant of that too. He is a 
pompous schoolmaster, or a captious verbal 
critic,or, in his most respectable capacity ,a harm- 
less and dreaming pedant,— a Dominie Sampson. 
If England had existed before Greece, he would 
have been an idolater of Shakspeare and Milton, 
at the expense of Homer and Euripides ; or he 
would have known just as much of the former as 
he does of the latter ! that is to say, nothing. 
In short, you may describe him as a man who 
knows that there is another man living on the 
upper side of his town, of the name of Ancient ; 
and a very wonderful gentleman he takesAncient 
to be, beeause he is rich, and has a large library, 
and has given him access to it ; but what sort 
of a man Ancient really is, what is the solidity 
of his understanding, the subtlety of his ima- 
gination, or the contents of the books in his 
library, except that they are printed in certain 
kinds of type,— of all that our learned friend 
knows nothing, and therefore he concludes, 
that nobody else can know. 

Of the other extreme of pretenders who 
dogmatise on this subject, that is to say, who 
pronounce peremptory judgments of Yes and 
No, and Possible and Impossible, without a due 
knowledge of the subject, — the best and most 
intelligent portion sometimes contains persons 
who know so much on other points, that they 
ought to know better on this ; but out of a 
resentment of the very want of the other's 
advantages, affect to despise them. For herein 
the exalters of a classical education, as the only 
thing needful, and the deciders of it as a thing 
altogether unecessary, set out from precisely 
the same ground of self-sufficiency. The former 
unduly trumpet up the education, merely be- 
cause they have had it, (or think they have,) 
and the latter as rudely decry it, merely because 
they have not. These latter argue, that you 
may know all that is useful in ancient books, 
by means of translations ; and that the poetry 
"and all that" may be got equally out of 



them, or is of no consequence. Their own 
poetry, meanwhile, such as it is, that is to say, 
their caprices, their imaginary advantages, 
and the colouring which their humour and 
passions give to everything near them, is in 
full blossom. 

To cut short this question, which we feel more 
loth to touch upon in the latter instance than 
in the former, (because more sympathy is due 
to the resentment of a want than to the arro- 
gance of a possession,) we may, perhaps, illus- 
trate the point at once to the reader's satisfac- 
tion, by the help of no greater a passage than a 
jest out of "Joe Miller." 

It is related of Archbishop Herring, that 
when he was at college, he fell one day into a 
gutter, and that a wag exclaimed as he got up, 
"Ah, Herring, you're in a pretty pickle ! " Upon 
which a dull fellow went away, and said, " So- 
and-so has been bantering poor Herring. Her- 
ring fell into the gutter, and so, says Dick, 
says he, Ah, Herring, my boy, you're in a 
pretty situation" 

Now the pedant, who is all for the original 
language, and is of opinion that no version of 
their writers or account of them can give you 
the least idea of their spirit, is bound to main- 
tain, on the same principle, that it would be 
impossible to convey the smallest real taste of 
this joke out of English into Latin or Greek ; 
while every real scholar knows that the thing 
is very possible. 

On the other side the bigoted no-scholar is 
bound to insist, that the stupid version of the 
joke is quite as good as the original, or at any 
rate supplies us with all that is really wanted 
of it, — that the word situation is as good as the 
word pickle, and that, therefore, no utility is 
lost sight of — no real information. It is true, 
the whole joke is lost, the whole spirit of the 
thing, but that is no matter. As to confining 
the notion of utility to matters of information, 
useful in the ordinary sense of the word, how- 
ever important, we will not waste our room 
upon it at this time of day, after all which has 
been said and understood to the contrary. The 
more we really know of anything, languages 
included, the more, as it has been finely said, 
do we " discipline" our" humanity ;" that is, teach 
our common nature to know what others have 
thought, felt, and known, before us, and so en- 
able our modesty and information to keep pace 
with each other. 

It will not be supposed by the reflecting 
reader that we mean to compare the sufficiency 
of a translation in the above instance with its 
being all that might be wanted in others, or 
that the spirit and peculiar fragrance (so to 
speak) of such poetry as Shakspeare's, could 
be transferred through a Greek medium with- 
out losing anything by the way ; unless a Shak- 
speare himself were the operator, or even then. 
Undoubtedly the peculiarity of the medium 
itself, the vessel, will make a difference. All 



34 



CRICKET, AND EXERCISE IN GENERAL. 



that we mean to say is, that some real taste of 
the essence of ancient genius, far better than 
what is afforded by the specimens generally on 
sale, can be given by means of great care and 
lovingness ; and that those who are so insanely 
learned as to take the vessel itself for the 
whole merit of the contents, have no taste of 
it at all. 



XIV.— CRICKET. 

AND EXERCISE IN GENERAL. (WRITTEN IN MAY.) 

The fine, hard, flat, verdant floors are now 
preparing in the cricket-grounds for this manly 
and graceful game, and the village - greens 
(where they can) are no less getting ready, 
though not quite so perfect. No matter for 
that. A true cricketer is not the man to be 
put out by a trifle. He serves an apprentice- 
ship to patience after her handsomest fashion. 
Henry the Fourth wished a time might arrive 
in France, when every man should have a 
pullet in his kettle. We should like to see a 
time when every man played at cricket, and 
had a sound sleep after it, and health, work, 
and leisure. It would be a pretty world, if we 
all had something to do, just to make leisure 
the pleasanter, and green merry England were 
sprinkled all over, " of afternoons," with gallant 
fellows in white sleeves, who threshed the 
earth and air of their cricket-grounds into a 
crop of health and spirits ; after which they 
should read, laugh, love, and be honourable and 
happy beings, bringing God's work to its per- 
fection, and suiting the divine creation they 
live in. 

But to speak in this manner is to mix serious 
things with mirthful. Well ; and what true 
joy does not ? Joy, if you did but know him 
thoroughly, is a very serious fellow, — on occa- 
sion ; and knows that happiness is a very solid 
thing, and is zealous for nature's honour and 
glory. The power to be grave is the proper 
foundation for levity itself to rejoice on. You 
must have floor for your dancing, — good solid 
earth on which to bother your cricket-balls. 

The Spring is monstrously said to be a sickly 
time of the year ! Yes, for the sickly ; or 
rather (not to speak irreverently of sickness 
which cannot be helped) for those who have suf- 
fered themselves to become so for want of stir- 
ring their bloods, and preparing for the general 
movement in Nature's merry veins. People 
stop in doors, and render themselves liable 
to all " the skiey influences," and then out of 
the same thoughtless effeminacy of self-indul- 
gence, they expose themselves to the catching 
of colds and fevers, and the beautiful Spring is 
blamed, and "fine Mays make fat church-yards." 
The gipsies, we will be bound, have no such pro- 
verbs. Thecricketer has none such. He is a sen- 
sible, hearty fellow, too wise not to take proper 
precautions, but above all, too wise not to take 



the best of all precautions ; which is, to take 
care of his health, and be stirring. Nature is 
stirring, and so is he. Nature is healthy, and 
so is he. Nature, in a hundred thousand parts 
to a fraction, is made up of air, and fields, and 
country, and out-of-doors, and a strong teeming 
earth, and a good-natured sky ; and so is the 
strong heart of the cricketer. 

Do we then blame any of the sick, even 
those who are " blameable ? " Not we ; we 
blame nobody ; what is the use of it ? Besides, 
we don't like to be blamed ourselves, especially 
when we are in the wrong. We like to be 
coaxed and called sensible, and to have people 
wonder good-naturedly (not spitefully) how 
people so very shrewd can do anything erro- 
neous ; and then we love them, and wish to be 
led right by people so very intelligent, and 
know no bounds to our wish to please them. 
So the measure which we like ourselves we 
would fain deal out to others. You may do it 
without any insincerity, if the patient have 
but one good or sensible quality, or one sweet 
drop in his heart, from which comfort is to be 
squeezed into the cup of advice. And who has 
not this ? But it may be said, it is not to 
be found. No ? Then the eyesight is very 
bad, or the patient is not to be mended, — a case 
luckily as rare as it is melancholy, and to be 
looked upon as a madness. The best step to 
be taken in that instance is, to give him as 
little advice, and see that he does as little 
harm as possible. For all reasonable care 
is to be taken of the comfort even of those 
who give none. They are a part of the human 
race. 

As to our sickly friends before mentioned, 
all we shall say to them is, what was said by 
an abrupt but benevolent friend of ours, to the 
startled ears of a fine lady — " Get out." 

" Well, I never ! " exclaimed the lady. 

The reader knows the perfection of meaning 
implied by that imperfect sentence, " Well, 
I never ! " However the lady was not only 
a fine lady, but a shrewd woman ; so she 
" got out," and was a goer out afterwards, and 
lived happily enough to benefit others by her 
example. 

Many people take no exercise at all, because 
they cannot take, or think they cannot take, 
a great deal. At least this is the reason they 
give their consciences. It is not always a 
sincere one. They had better say to them- 
selves at once " I am too idle," or " I am too 
accustomed to sit still, to make exercise plea- 
sant." Where the fault is aware of itself, there 
is better hope of its mending. But the least 
bit of exercise is better than none. A walk, 
five minutes before dinner in a garden, or down 
a street, is better than no walk at all. It is 
some break, however small a one, into the mere 
habit of sitting still and growing stagnant of 
blood, or corpulent of body. A little tiny bit 
of the sense of doing one's duty is kept up by 



CRICKET, AND EXERCISE IN GENERAL. 



35 



it. A glimpse of a reverence is retained for 
sprightliness of mind and shapeliness of per- 
son ; and thus the case is not rendered hope- 
less, should circumstances arise that tempt the 
patient into a more active system. A fair 
kinswoman of ours, once reckoned among the 
fairest of her native city, — a very intelligent 
woman as far as books went, and latterly a, very 
sharp observer into the faults of other people, 
by dint of a certain exasperation of her own, — 
literally fell a sacrifice to sitting in-doors, and 
never quitting her favourite pastime of read- 
ing. The pastime was at once her bane and 
her antidote. It would have been nothing but 
a blessing had she varied it. But her misfor- 
tune was, that her self-will was still greater 
than her sense, and that being able to fill up 
her moments as pleasantly as she wished 
during health, she had persuaded herself that 
she could go on filling them up as pleasantly 
by the same process, when she grew older ; 
and this " wouldn't do !" For our bodies are 
changing, while our minds are thinking nothing 
of the matter ; and people in vain attribute the 
new pains and weaknesses which come upon 
them to this and that petty cause, — a cold, or 
a heat, or an apple ; thinking they shall K be 
better to-morrow," and as healthy as they were 
before. Time will not palter with the real 
state of the case, for all our self-will and our 
over-weening confidence. The person we speak 
of literally rusted in her chair ; lost the use of 
her limbs, and died paralytic and ghastly to 
look upon, of premature old age. The physicians 
said it was a clear case. On the other hand, we 
heard some years ago of a gentleman of seventy, 
a medical man, (now most probably alive and 
merry — we hope he will read this,) who, meet- 
ing a kinsman of ours in the street, and being 
congratulated on the singular youthfulness 
of his aspect, said that he was never better or 
more active in his life ; that it was all owing 
to his having walked sixteen miles a day, on 
an average, for the greater part of it ; and that 
at the age of seventy, he felt all the lightness 
and cheerfulness of seventeen ! This is an 
extreme case, owing to peculiar circumstances ; 
but it shows of what our nature is capable, 
w r here favourable circumstances are not con- 
tradicted. This gentleman had cultivated a 
cheerful benevolence of mind, as well as activity 
of body, and the two together were irresistible, 
even to old Time. The death of such a man 
must be like going to sleep after a good 
journey. 

The instinct which sets people in exercise 
is one of the most natural of all instincts, and 
where it is totally stopped, must have been 
hurt by some very injudicious circumstances 
in the bringing up, either of pampered will or 
prevented activity. The restlessness felt by 
nervous people is Nature's kindly intimation 
that they should bestir themselves. Motion, 
as far as hitherto has been known, is the first 



law of the universe. The air, the rivers, the 
world move ; the very " fixed stars," as we 
call them, are moving towards some unknown 
point ; the substance, apparently the most 
unmoving, the table in your room, or the wall 
of the opposite house, is gaining or losing 
particles : if you had eyes fine enough, you 
would see its surface stirring : some philoso- 
phers even hold that every substance is made 
up of vital atoms. As to oneself, one must 
either move away from death and disease, and 
so keep pleasantly putting them off, or they 
will move us with a vengeance, ay, in the midst 
of our most sedentary forgetfulness, or while 
we flatter ourselves we are as still and as 
sound as marble. Time is all the while 
drawing lines in our faces, clogging our limbs, 
putting ditch-water into our blood ; — preparing 
us to mingle with the grave and the rolling 
earth, since we will not obey the great law, 
and move of our own accord. 

Come, dear readers, now is the season for 
such of you as are virtuous in this matter to 
pride and rejoice yourselves ; and for such of 
you as have omitted the virtue in your list, to 
put it there. It will grace and gladden all the 
rest. A cricketer is a sort of glorifier of exer- 
cise, and we respect him accordingly : but it is 
not in every one's power to be a cricketer ; 
and respect attends a man in proportion as he 
does what he is able. Come then, be respect- 
able in this matter as far as you can ; — have a 
whole mile's respectability, if possible, — or two 
miles, or four : let our homage wait upon you 
into the fields, thinking of all the good you are 
doing to yourselves, to your kindred, to your 
offspring, born or not born, and to all friends 
who love you, and would be grieved to lose you. 
Healthy and graceful example makes healthy 
and graceful children, makes cheerful tempers, 
makes grateful and loving friends. We know 
but of one inconvenience resulting from the 
sight of such virtue ; and that is, that it some- 
times makes one love it too much, and long to 
know it, and show our gratitude. A poet has 
said, that he never could travel through different 
places and think how many agreeable people 
they probably contained, without feeling a sort 
of impatience at not being able to make their 
acquaintance. But he was a rich poet, and his 
benevolence was a little pampered and self- 
willed. It is enough for us that we sometimes 
resent our inability to know those whom we 
behold, — who charm us visibly, or of whose 
existence, somehow or other, we are made 
pleasantly certain, without going so far as to 
raise up exquisite causes of distress after his 
fashion. Now, as we never behold the cricketer, 
or the horseman, or the field-stroller (provided 
we can suppose him bound on his task with a 
liking of it) without a feeling of something 
like respect and gratitude (for the twofold 
pleasurable idea he gives us of nature and 
himself), so we cannot look upon all those fair 



36 



A DUSTY DAY. 



creatures, blooming or otherwise, who walk 
abroad with their friends or children, whether 
in village or town, fine square or common 
street, without feeling something like a bit of 
love, and wishing that the world were in such 
condition as to let people evince what they 
feel, and be more like good, honest folks, and 
chatty companions. If we sometimes admire 
maid-servants instead of their mistresses, it is 
not our fault, but that of the latter, who will not 
come abroad. Besides, a real good-humoured 
maid-servant, with a pretty face, playing over 
the sward of a green square with her mistress's 
children, is a very respectable, as well as plea- 
sant object. May no inferior of the other sex, 
under pretence of being a gentleman, deceive 
her, and render her less so. 



XV.— A DUSTY DAY. 

Among the "Miseries of Human Life," as a 
wit pleasantly entitled them, there are few, 
while the rascal is about it, worse than a Great 
Cloud of Dust, coming upon you in street or 
road, you having no means of escape, and the 
carriages, or flock of sheep, evidently being 
bent on imparting to you a full share of their 
besetting horror. The road is too narrow to 
leave you a choice, even if it had two pathways, 
which it has not : — the day is hot ; the wind is 
whisking ; you have come out in stockings in- 
stead of boots, not being aware that you were 
occasionally to have two feet depth of dust to 
walk in : — noic, now the dust is on you, — you 
are enveloped, — you are blind ; you have to 
hold your hat on against the wind : the carriages 
grind by, or the sheep go pattering along, 
baaing through all the notes of their poor 
gamut ; perhaps carriages and sheep are toge- 
ther, the latter eschewing the horses' legs, and 
the shepherd's dog driving against your own, 
and careering over the woolly backs : — Whew ! 
what a dusting ! What a blinding ! What a 
whirl ! The noise decreases ; you stop ; you 
look about you ; gathering up your hat, coat, 
and faculties, after apologising to the gentleman 
against whom you have "lumped," and who 
does not look a bit the happier for your apology. 
The dust is in your eyes, in your hair, in your 
shoes and stockings, in your neck-cloth, in your 
mouth. You grind your teeth in dismay, and 
find them gritty. 

Perhaps another carriage is coming ; and 
you, finding yourself in the middle of the road, 
and being resolved to be master of, at least, 
this inferior horror, turn about towards the 
wall or paling, and propose to make your way 
accordingly, and have the dust behind your 
back instead of in front ; when lo ! you begin 
sneezing, and cannot see. You have taken in- 
voluntary snuff. 

Or you suddenly discern a street, down 
which you can turn, which you do with rap- 



ture, thinking to get out of wind and dust at 
once ; when, unfortunately, you discover that 
the wind is veering to all points of the compass, 
and that, instead of avoiding the dust, there is 
a ready-made and intense collection of it, then 
in the act of being swept into your eyes by the 
attendants on a dust-cart ! 

The reader knows what sort of a day we 
speak of. It is all dusty ; — the windows are 
dusty ; the people are dusty ; the hedges in the 
roads are horribly dusty, — pitiably, — you think 
they must feel it ; shoes and boots are like a 
baker's : men on horseback eat and drink 
dust ; coachmen sit screwing up their eyes ; 
the gardener finds his spade slip into the 
ground, fetching up smooth portions of earth, 
all made of dust. What is the poor pedestrian 
to do? 

To think of something superior to the dust, — 
whether grave or gay. This is the secret of 
being master of any ordinary, and of much ex- 
traordinary trouble :— bring a better idea upon 
it, and it is hard if the greater thought does not 
do something against the less. When we meet 
with any very unpleasant person, to whose ways 
we cannot suddenly reconcile ourselves, we 
think of some delightful friend, perhaps two 
hundred miles off, — in Northumberland, or in 
Wales. When dust threatens to blind us, wo 
shut our eyes to the disaster, and contrive to 
philosophise a bit even then. 

" Oh, but it is not worth while doing that." 

Good. If so, there is nothing to do but to be 
as jovial as the dust itself, and take all gaily. 
Indeed, this is the philosophy we speak of. 

" And yet the dust is annoying too." 

Well — take then just as much good sense as 
you require for the occasion. Think of a jest ; 
think of a bit of verse ; think of the dog you 
saw just now, coming out of the pond, and 
frightening the dandy in his new trousers. But 
at all events don't let your temper be mastered 
by such a thing as a cloud of dust. It will 
show, either that you have a very infirm temper 
indeed, or no ideas in your head. 

On all occasions in life, great or small, you 
may be the worse for them, or the better. You 
may be made the weaker or the stronger by 
them ; ay, even by so small a thing as a little 
dust. 

When the famous Arbuthnot was getting 
into his carriage one day, he was beset with 
dust. What did he do ? Damn the dust or 
the coachman ? No ; that was not his fashion. 
He was a wit, and a good-natured man ; so he 
fell to making an epigram, which he sent to 
his friends. It was founded on scientific 
knowledge, and consisted of the following plea- 
sant exaggeration : — 

ON A DUSTY DAY. 

The dust in smaller particles arose, 
Than those which fluid bodies do compose. 
Contraries in extremes do often meet ; 
It was so dry, that you might call it wet. 



BRICKLAYERS, AND AN OLD BOOK. 



37 



Dust at a distance sometimes takes a bur- 
nished or tawny aspect in the sun, almost as 
handsome as the great yellow smoke out of 
breweries ; and you may amuse your fancy 
with thinking of the clouds that precede armies 
in the old books of poetry,— the spears gleaming 
out, — the noise of the throng growing on the 
ear, — and, at length, horses emerging, and 
helmets and flags, — the Lion of King Richard, 
or the Lilies of France. 

Or you may think of some better and more 
harmless palm of victory, " not without dust" 
{palma non sine pulvere) ; dust, such as Horace 
says the horsemen of antiquity liked to kick up 
at the Olympic games, or as he more elegantly 
phrases it, " collect" (collegisse juvat ; — which a 
punster of our acquaintance translated, " kick- 
ing up a dust at college") ; or if you are in a 
very philosophic vein indeed, you may think of 
man's derivation from dust, and his return to 
it, redeeming your thoughts from gloom by the 
hopes beyond dust, and by the graces which 
poetry and the affections have shed upon it in 
this life, like flowers upon graves, — lamenting 
with the tender Petrarch, that "those eyes of 
which he spoke so warmly," and that golden 
hair, and " the lightning of that angel smile," 
and all those other beauties which made him a 
lover " marked out from among men" — a being 
abstracted "from the rest of his species," — are 
now " a little dust, without a feeling" — 

"Pocapolvere son che nulla sente " — 

or repeating that beautiful lyric of the last of 
the Shakspearian men, Shirley, which they 
say touched even the thoughtless bosom of 
Charles the Second : — 

death's final conquest. 

The glories of our birth and state 

Are shadows, not substantial things : 
There is no armour against fate ; 

Death lays his icy hand on kings : 
Sceptre and crown 
Must tumble down, 
And in the dust be equal made 
With the poor crooked scythe and spade- 
Borne men with swords may reap the field 

And plant fresh laurels where they kill : 
But their strong nerves at last must yield, 

They tame but one another still. 

Early or late 

They stoop to fate, 

And must give up their murmuring breath, 

When they, pale captives, creep to death. 
The garlands wither on your brow, 

Then boast no more your mighty deeds ; 
Upon death's purple altar now 

See where the victor-victim bleeds : 
All heads must come 
To the cold tomb : 

Only the actions of the just 

Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust. 

Most true ; but with the leave of the fine 
poet (which he would gladly have conceded to 
us), Death's conquest is not " final ;" for 
Heaven triumphs over him, and Love too, and 



Poetry ; and thus we can get through the cloud 
even of his dust, and shake it, in aspiration, 
from our wings. Besides, we know not, with 
any exactitude, what or who Death is, or 
whether there is any such personage, even in 
his negative sense, except inasmuch as he is a 
gentle voice, calling npon us to go some jour- 
ney ; for the very dust that he is supposed 
to deal in, is alive ; is the cradle of other 
beings and vegetation ; nay, its least particle 
belongs to a mighty life ; — is planetary, — is 
part of our star, — is the stuff of which the 
worlds are made, that roll and rejoice round 
the sun. 

Of these or the like reflections, serious or 
otherwise, are the cogitations of the true pe- 
destrian composed ; — such are the weapons 
with which he triumphs over the most hostile 
of his clouds, whether material or metapho- 
rical ; and, at the end of his dusty walk, he 
beholdeth, in beautiful perspective, the towel, 
and the basin and water, with which he will 
render his eyes, cheeks, and faculties, as cool 
and fresh, as if no dust had touched them ; 
nay, more so, for the contrast. Never forget that 
secret of the reconcilements of this life. To sit 
down, newly washed and dressed, after a dusty 
journey, and hear that dinner is to be ready 
"in ten minutes," is a satisfaction — a crowning 
and "measureless content" — which we hope no 
one will enjoy who does not allow fair play 
between the harmless lights and shadows of 
existence, and treat his dust with respect. We 
defy him to enjoy it, at any rate, like those who 
do. His ill-temper, somehow or other, will rise 
in retribution against him, and find dust on his 
saddle of mutton. 



XVI.-BRICKLAYERS, AND AN OLD BOOK. 

It is a very hot day and a "dusty day;" 
you are passing throngh a street in which there 
is no shade, — a new street, only half-built and 
half-paved — the areas unfinished as you advance 
(it is to be hoped no drunken man will stray 
there) — the floors of the houses only raftered 
(you can't go in and sit down) — broken glass, 
at the turnings, on the bits of garden wall — 
the time, noon — the month, August — the whole 
place glaring with the sun, and coloured with 
yellow brick, chalk, and lime. Occasionally 
you stumble upon the bottom of an old sauce- 
pan, or kick a baked shoe. 

In this very hot passage through life, you are 
longing for soda-water, or for the sound of a 
pump, when suddenly you 

" Hear a trowel tick against a brick," 

and down a ladder by your side, which bends 
at every step, comes dancing, with hod on 
shoulder, a bricklayer, who looks as dry as 
his vocation, — his eyes winking, his mouth 
gaping; his beard grim with a week's growth, 



38 



BRICKLAYERS, AND AN OLD BOOK. 



the rest of his hair like a badger's. You then 
for the first time see a little water by the way- 
side, thick and white with chalk ; and are 
I doubting whether to admire it as a liquid or 
detest it for its colour, when a quantity of lime 
is dashed against the sieve, and you receive in 
your eyes and mouth a taste of the dry and 
burning elements of mortar, without the re- 
freshment of the wet. Finally, your shoe is 
burned ; and as the bricklayer says something 
to his fellow in Irish, who laughs, you fancy 
that he is witty at your expense, and has made 
some ingenious bull. 

" A pretty picture, Mr. Seer ! and very 
refreshing, this hot weather !" 

Oh, but you are only a chance-acquaintance 
of us, my dear Sir ; you don't know what phi- 
losophies we writers and readers of " The Seer" 
possess, which render us " lords of ourselves," 
unencumbered even with the mighty misery 
of a hot day, and the hod on another man's 
shoulder. You, unfortunate easy man, have 
been thinking of nothing but the " aggravations" 
of the street all this while, and are ready to 
enter your house after the walk, in a temper 
to kick off your shoes into the servant's face. 
We, besides being in the street, have been in 
all sorts of pleasant and remote places ; have 
been at Babylon ; have been at Bagdad ; have 
bathed in the river Tigris, the river of that city 
of the " Arabian Nights ;" nay, have been in 
Paradise itself! led by old Bochart and his 
undeniable maps, where you see the place as 
"graphically set forth" as though it had 
never vanished, and Adam and Eve walking in 
it, taller than the trees. We are writing upon 
the very book this moment instead of a desk, 
a fond custom of ours ; though, for dignity's 
sake, we beg to say we have a desk ; but we 
like an old folio to write upon, written by 
some happy believing hand, no matter whe- 
ther we go all lengths or not with Ms sort of 
proof, provided he be in earnest and a good 
fellow*. 

Let us indulge ourselves a moment, during 
this hot subject, with the map in question. It 
is now before us, the river Euphrates running 
up through it in dark fulness, and appearing 
through the paper on which we are writing like 
rich veins. Occasionally we take up the paper to 
see it better ; the garden of Eden, however, 
always remaining visible below, and the moun- 
tains of Armenia at top. The map is a small 
folio size, darkly printed, with thick letters ; a 
good stout sprinkle of mountains ; a great tower 
to mark the site of Babylon ; trees, as formal 
as a park in those days, to shadow forth the 
terrestrial paradise, with Adam and Eve, as 
before mentioned ; Greek and Hebrew names 
here and there mingled with the Latin ; a lion, 
towards the north-west, sitting in Armenia, and 

* Our volume is the Geographia Sacra, followed by his 
commentary on Stephen of Byzantium, the treatise De 
Jure Regum, &c. &c. The Leyden Edition, 1707. 



some other beast, 
"stepping west" from the Caspian sea ; and a 
great tablet in the south-west corner, present- 
ing the title of the map, the site of Eden, or 
the TerrestriaJ Paradise (Edenis, seu Paradisi 
Terrestris Situs), surmounted with a tree, and 
formidable with the Serpent ; who, suddenly 
appearing from one side of it with the apple 
in his mouth, is startling a traveller on the 
other. These old maps are as good to study 
as pictures and books : and the regiou before 
us is specially rich — reverend with memories 
of scripture, pompous with Alexander's cities, 
and delightful with the "Arabian Nights." You 
go up from the Persian Gulf at the foot, passing 
(like Sindbad) the city of Caiphat, where 
"bdellium" is to be had, and the island of 
Bahrim, famous for its pearl fishery (Bahrim 
Insula Margaritarum Piscat. Celebris); then 
penetrate the garden of Eden, with the river 
Euphrates, as straight as a canal ; pass the 
Cypress-grove, which furnished the wood of 
which the ark was made ; Mousal, one of our 
old friends in the "Arabian Nights ;" Babylon, 
famous for a hundred fanes, the sublime of 
brick-building ; Ntf-pm the " Naarda of Ptolemy," 
a " celebrated school of the Jews ;" Ur (of the 
dial dees), the country of Abraham ; Noah's 
city, Xcafi-q Qa/xavwv, the city of Eight, so called 
from the eight persons that came out of the 
ark ; Omar's Island, where there is a mosque 
(says the map) made out of the relics of the 
ark ; Mount Ararat, on the top of which it 
rested ; and thence you pass the springs of the 
Tigris and the Euphrates into Colchis with its 
Golden Fleece, leaving the Caspian sea on 
one side, and the Euxine on the other, with 
Phasis the country of pheasants, and Cappadocia, 
where you see the mild light shining on the 
early Christian church ; and you have come 
all this way through the famous names of 
Persia, and Arabia, and Armenia, and Mesopo- 
tamia, and Syria, and Assyria, with Arbela 
on the right hand, where Darius was over- 
thrown, and Damascus on the left, rich, from 
time immemorial to this day, with almost 
every Eastern association of ideas, sacred and 
profane. 

In regions of this nature, did sincere, book- 
loving, scholarly Bochart spend the dap of his 
mind, — by far the greater portion of the actual 
days of such a man's life ; and for that reason 
we, who, though not so scholarly, love books 
as well as he did, love to have the folio of such 
a man under our paper for a desk, — making 
his venerable mixture of truth and fiction a 
foundation, as it were, for our own love of both, 
and rendering the dream of his existence, in 
some measure, as tangible to us as it was to 
himself, in the shape of one of his works of 
love. — Do people now-a-days, — do even we 
ourselves, — love books as they did in those 
times ? It is hardly possible, seeing how the 
volumes have multiplied to distract choice and 



BRICKLAYERS, AND AN OLD BOOK. 



39 



passion, and also how small in size they have 
become, — octavos and duodecimos. A little 
book is indeed "a love," (to use a modern 
phrase,) — and fitted to carry about with us in 
our walks and pockets : but then a great book, 
— a folio, — was a thing to look up to, — to build, 
— a new and lawful Babel, — and therefore it 
had an aspect more like a religion. — Well • 
love is religion too, and of the best ; and so we 
will return to our common task. 

Now observe, casual reader of " The Seer," 
what such of us as are habituated to it found 
in our half-built street. You take a brick per- 
haps for an ordinary bit of burnt clay, fit only 
to build No. 9, Golf-street, Little Meadows ; 
and to become a brick-bat, and be kicked to 
piecesin an old alley. O thou of littlebookstall! 
Why, the very manufacture is illustrious with 
antiquity — with the morning beams that touched 
the house-tops of Shinaar ; — there is a clatter of 
brick-making in the fields of Accad ; and the 
work looks almost as ancient to this day, with 
its straw-built tents and its earthy landscape. 
Not desolate therefore, or unrefreshed, were 
j we in our new and hot street ; for the first 
brick, like a talisman, transported us into old 
Babylon, with its tower and its gardens ; and 
there we drove our chariot on the walls, and 
conversed with Herodotus, and got out of the 
way of Semiramis, and read, as men try to read 
at this day, the arrow-headed letters on the 
bricks, — as easy to us at that time as A. B. C. ; 
though what they mean now, neither we nor 
Mr. Rich can tell. The said brick, as our 
readers have seen, thence took us into paradise, 
and so through all the regions of Mesopotamia 
and the Arabian Nights, with our friends 
Bochart and Bedreddin Hassan ; and returning 
home, what do we descry ? The street itself 
alone ! No : Ben Jonson, the most illustrious 
of bricklayers, handling his trowel on the walls 
of Chancery-lane, and the obstinate remnants 
of Roman brick and mortar lurking still about 
London, and Spenser's celebration of — 

" Those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ride, 
"Where now the studious lawyers have their bowres ; " 

to wit, the Temple ; and then we think of our 
old and picture-learned friend, our lamented 
Hazlitt, who first taught us not to think white 
cottages better than red, especially among trees, 
noting to us the finer harmony of the contrast 
— to which we can bear instant and curious 
testimony ; for passing the other day through 
the gate that leads from St. James's Park into 
the old court, betwixt Sutherland and Marlbo- 
rough Houses, we marvelled at what seemed 
to our near-sighted eyes a shower of red colours 
in a tree to the right of us, at the corner ; which 
colours, upon inspection, proved to be nothing 
better than those of the very red bricks, that 
bordered the windows of the building behind 
the trees. We smiled at the mistake : but it 



was with pleasure ; for it reminded us that 
even defects of vision may have their compen- 
sations ; and it looked like a symbol of the 
pleasures with which fancy, and common-place, 
may conspire to enrich an observer willing to 
be pleased. 

The most elegant houses in the world, gene- 
rally speaking, are built of clay. You have 
riches inside, — costliness and beauty on the 
internal walls, — paintings, papers, fine draperies, 
— themselves compounded of the homeliest 
growths of the earth ; but pierce an inch or 
two outwards, and you come to the stuff of 
which the hovel is made. It is nothing but 
mind at last which throws elegance upon the 
richest as well as the poorest materials. Let 
a rich man give a hundred guineas for a daub, 
and people laugh at him and his daub together. 
The inside of his wall is no better than his 
out. But let him put Titian or Correggio upon 
it, and he puts rabid there, — visible mind, and 
therefore the most precious to all ; his own 
mind too, as well as the painter's, for love par- 
takes of what it loves ; and yet the painter's 
visible mind is not a bit different, except in 
degree, from the mind with which every lover 
of the graceful and the possible may adorn what- 
soever it looks upon. The object will be perhaps 
rich in itself, but if not, it will be rich, somehow 
or other, in association ! and it cannot be too 
often repeated, as a truth in strictest logic, that 
every impression is real which is actually 
made upon us, whether by fact or fancy. No 
minds entirely divorce the two, or can divorce 
them, even if they evince the spiritual part of 
their faculties in doing nothing better than 
taking a fancy to a tea-cup or a hat ; and Nature, 
we may be assured, intended that we should 
receive pleasure from the associations of ideas, 
as well as from images tangible ; for all man- 
kind, more or less, do so. The great art is to 
cultivate impressions of the pleasant sort, just 
as a man will raise wholesome plants in his 
garden, and not poisonous ones. 

A bricklayer's tools may illustrate a passage 
in Shakspeare. One of them is called a bevel, 
and is used to cut the under-side of bricks to a 
required angle. " Bevel" is a sort of irregular 
square. 

" They that level 

At my abuses, reckon up their own. 

I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel." 

Sonnet CXXI. 

We shall conclude this paper with two brick- 
laying anecdotes, one of which has more manner 
than matter ; but there is an ease in it, very 
comforting, when we reflect upon the laborious- 
ness of the occupation in a hot day. And this 
reminds us, that in considering the bricklayer, 
we must not forget how many of his hours he 
passes in a world of his own, though in the 
streets, — pacing on scaffolding, descending and 
ascending ladders, living on the outsides of 
houses,- betwixt ground-floors and garrets, or 



40 



A RAINY DAY. 



the sun, now catching a breeze unknown to us 
prisoners of the pavement. We have heard of 
a bricklayer who was a somnambulist by day- 
time, and used to go on with his work in that 
state, along the precipices of parapet walls, 
overlooking us from the top — now burning in 
and the nice points of tops of ladders. But to 
our anecdotes : — 

An acquaintance of ours was passing a street 
in which Irish bricklayers were at work, when 
he heard one of them address, from below, 
another who was sending him baskets down 
by a rope. "Lour asy, wou'd you ?" said he ; 
meaning that his friend was to lower the baskets 
in a style less hasty and inconvenient. " Lour 
asy!" exclaimed the other, in a tone indignant 
at having the quiet perfection of his movements 
called in question, and in the very phraseology 
of which we seem to hear the Hibernian eleva- 
tion of his eyebrows, as well as the rough 
lightness of his voice, "I lour so asy, I don't 
know how I lour." 

The other story appears to us to exhibit the 
very prince of bulls — the prize animal in that 
species of cattle. — An Irish labourer laid a 
wager with another, that the latter could not 
carry him up the ladder to the top of a house 
in his hod, without letting him fall. Agreed. 
The hod is occupied, the ladder ascended, there 
is peril at every step. Above all, there is life 
and the loss of the wager at the top of the lad- 
der, death and success below ! The house-top 
is reached in safety; the wagerer looks humbled 
and disappointed. "Well," said he, " you have 
won ; there is no doubt of that ; worse luck to 
you another time ; but at the third story / had 
hopes" 



XVII— -A RAINY DAY. 

u Pour ! pour ! pour ! There is no hope of 
its leaving off" — says a lady, turning away from 
the window ; " you must make up your mind, 
Louisa, to stay at home, and lose your romps, 
and have a whole frock to sit in at dinner, and 
be very unhappy with mamma." 

" No, mamma, not that ; but don't you think 
it will hold up ? Look, the kennels are not quite 
so bad ; and those clouds — they are not so 
heavy as they were. It is getting quite light 
in the sky." 

" I am afraid not," says the lady, at once 
grave and smiling ; " but you are a good girl, 
Louisa ; give me a kiss. We will make the 
day as happy as we can at home. I am not a 
very bad play-fellow, you know, for all I am so 
much bigger and older." 

"Oh mamma, you know I never enjoy my 
cousin's company half so much, if you don't go 
with me ; but (here two or three kisses are 
given and taken, the lady's hands holding the 
little girl's cheeks, and her eyes looking fondly 
into hers, which are a little wet)— but — but 



don't you think we really shall be able to go — 
don't you think it will hold up ?" And here the 
child returns to the window. 

" No, my darling ; it is set in for a rainy day. 
It has been raining all the morning ; it is now 
afternoon, and we have, I fear, no chance 
whatever." 

" The puddles don't dance quite as fast as 
they did," says the little girl. 

" But hark !" says the lady ; " there's a furious 
dash of water against the panes." 

".Tl t .'" quoth the little girl against her 
teeth ; " dear me ! It's very bad indeed ; I 
wonder what Charles and Mary are thinking 
of it." 

" Why, they are thinking just as you are, I 
dare say; and doing just as you are, very likely, 
— making their noses flat and numb against the 
glass." 

The little girl laughs, with a tear in her eye, 
and mamma laughs and kisses her, and says, 
" Come ; as you cannot go to see your cousins, 
you shall have a visitor yourself. You shall 
invite me and Miss Nayler to dinner, and sit at 
the head of the table in the little room, and we 
will have your favourite pudding, and no ser- 
vant to wait on us. We will wait on ourselves; 
little child, and behave well; and you shall 
tell papa, when he comes home, what a nice 
and I will try to be a very great, good, big 
girl I was." 

" Oh dear mamma, that will be very pleasant 
— What a nice, kind mamma you are, and how 
afraid I am to vex you, though you do play and 
romp with me." 

" Good girl ! But — Ah, you need not look at 
the window any more, my poor Louisa. Go, 
and tell cook about the pudding, and we will 
get you to give us a glass of wine after it, and 
drink the health of your cousins, so as to fancy 
them partaking it with us ; and Miss Nayler 
and I will make fine speeches, and return you 
their thanks ; and then you can tell them 
about it, when you go next time.'' 

" Oh dear, dear, dear mamma, so I can ; and 
how very nice that will be ; and I'll go this in- 
stant about the pudding ; and I don't think we 
could go as far as Welland's now, if the rain 
did hold up ; and the puddles are worse than 
ever." 

And so, off runs little fond-heart and bright- 
eyes, happy at dining in fancy with her mother 
and cousins all at once, and almost feeling 
as if she had but exchanged one holiday for 
another. 

The sight of mother and daughter has made 
us forget our rainy day.— Alas ! the lady was 
right, and the little child wrong, for there is 
no chance of to-day's clearing up. The long- 
watched and interesting puddles are not indeed 
" worse than ever" — not suddenly hurried and 
exasperated, as if dancing with rage at the 
flogging given them : they are worse even 
than that, for they are everlastingly the same : 



A RAINY DAY. 



— the same full, twittering, dancing, circle- 
making overflowings of gutter, which they 
have been ever since five in the morning, and 
which they mean to be, apparently, till five 
to-morrow. 

Wash ! wash ! wash ! The window-panes, 
weltering, and dreary, and rapid, and misty 
with the rain, are like the face of a crying child 
who is afraid to make a noise, but who is re- 
solved to be as " aggravating" as possible with 
the piteous ostentation of his wet cheeks, — 
weeping with all his might, and breathing, 
with wide-open mouth, a sort of huge, wilful, 
everlasting sigh, by way of accompaniment. 
Occasionally he puts his hand over to his ear, 
— hollow, — as though he feared to touch it, his 
master having given him a gentle pinch : and 
at the same moment, he stoops with bent 
head and shrugged shoulders, and one lifted 
knee, as if in the endurance of a writhing 
anguish. 

You involuntarily rub one of the panes, think- 
ing to see the better into the street, and for- 
getting that the mist is made by the rain on 
the other side. — On goes the wet as ever, rush- 
ing, streaming, running down, mingling its soft 
and washy channels ; and now and then comes 
a clutter of drops against the glass, made by a 
gust of wind. 

Clack, meantime, goes the sound of pattens ; 
and when you do see, you see the street almost 
deserted, — a sort of lay Sunday. The rare 
carriages drive as fast as they can ; the 
hackney-coaches lumber along, glossy (on such 
occasions only) with the wet, and looking as 
old and rheumatic as the poor coachmen, whose 
hats and legs are bound with straw ; the rain- 
spouts are sputtering torrents ; messengers 
dart along in oil-skin capes ; the cry of the old 
shrimp-seller is hoarse ; the postman's knock is 
ferocious. 

If you are out of doors, woe betide you, 
should you have gone out unprepared, or rely- 
ing on a coach. Your shoes and stockings are 
wet through, the latter almost as muddy as the 
dog that ran by just now without an owner ; 
the rain washes your face, gets into the nape 
of your neck, makes a spout of your hat. Close 
by your ears comes roaring an umbrella, the 
face underneath it looking astonished at you. 
A butcher's boy dashes along, and contrives to 
come with his heel plump upon the exact spot 
of a loose piece of pavement, requisite for 
giving you a splash that shall embrace the 
whole of your left leg. To stand up under a 
gateway is impossible, because in the state you 
are in, you will catch your " death o'cold ;" and 
the people underneath it look at you amazed, 
to think how you could have come out " such a 
day, in such a state." Many of those who are 
standing up, have umbrellas ; but the very 
umbrellas are wet through. Those who pass 
by the spot, with their oil or silk skins roaring 
as above (a sound particularly distressing to 



the non-possessors) show that they have not 
been out of doors so long. Nobody puts his 
hand out from under the gate-way to feel 
whether it is still raining. There can be no 
question of it. The only voluntary person 
visible in the street is a little errand-boy, who 
because his mother has told him to make great 
haste, and not get wet feet, is amusing himself 
with double zest, by kicking something along 
through the gutter. 

In private streets, the pavement is washed 
clean ; and so it is for the moment in public ; 
but horrible will be the mud to-morrow. 
Horses are splashed up to the mane ; the legs 
of the rider's overalls are as if he had been 
sitting in a ditch ; poor girls with bandboxes 
trip patiently along, with their wet curls over 
their eyes, and a weight of skirt. A carriage 
is coming down a narrow street ; there is 
a plenitude of mud between you and the 
wheels, not to be eschewed ; on dash they, 
and give you three beauty spots, one right on 
the nose. 

Swift has described such a day as this in lines 
which first appeared in the "Tatler," and 
which hearty, unenvying Steele introduces as 
written by one, " who treats of every subject 
after a manner that no other author has done, 
and better than any other can do." [In tran- 
scribing such words, one's pen seems to partake 
the pleasure of the writer.] Swift availing 
himself of the licence of a different age, is apt 
to bring less pleasant images among his plea- 
sant ones, than suit everybody now : but here 
follows the greater part of his verses : — 

" Careful observers may foretell the hour, 

By sure prognostics, when to dread a shower : 

While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er 

Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. 

If you be wise, then go not far to dine, 

You'll spend in coach hire more than save in wine. — 

A coming shower your shooting corns presage, 

Old aches will throb, your hollow tooth will rage. 

Sauntering in coffee-house is Dulman seen ; 

He damns the climate, and complains of spleen. 

Meanwhile the south, rising with dabbled wings, 
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings. 

Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope, 
While the first drizzling shower is borne aslope ; 
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean 
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean. 
You fly, invoke the gods ; then, turning, stop 
To rail ; she, singing, still whirls on her mop. — 
Not yet the dust had shunn'd the unequal strife, 
But, aided by the wind, fought still for life ; 
And, wafted with its foe by violent gust, 
'Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust. 
Ah ! where must needy poet seek for aid. 
When dust and rain at once his coat invade ? — 
Hi3 only coat,— where dust confused with rain, 
Roughens the nap, and leaves a mingled stain ? 

" Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, 
Threatening with deluge this devoted town. 
To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, 
Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. 
The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, 
Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. 



42 



THE EAST WIND. 



The tuck'd-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, 
While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides. 
There various kinds, by various fortunes led, 
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed. 
Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs 
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. 
Box'd in a chair*, the beau impatient sits, 
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits ; 
And ever and anon with frightful din, 
The leather sounds ; he trembles from within. 
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, 
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed, 
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, 
Instead of paying chairmen ran them through), 
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear, 
And each imprison' d hero quaked for fear." 

The description concludes with a triumphant 
account of a gutter, more civic than urbane. 

How to make the best of a bad day has been 
taught by implication in various pages through- 
out our writings, especially in those where we 
have studied the art of making everything out 
of nothing, and have delivered immense obser- 
vations on rain-drops. It may be learned in the 
remarks which appeared in our No. XV. on 
a " Dusty Day." The secret is short and com- 
prehensive, and fit for trying occasions of all 
sorts. Think of something superior to it ; — make 
it yield entertaining and useful reflection, as 
the rain itself brings out the flowers. Think 
of it as a benignant enemy, who keeps you in- 
doors, or otherwise puts your philosophy to a 
trial, for the best of purposes, — to fertilise your 
fields, to purify your streets against contagion, 
— to freshen your air and put sweets upon 
your table, to furnish life with variety, your 
light with a shadow that sets it off, your poets 
with similes and descriptions. When the 
summer rains, Heaven is watering your plants. 
Fancy an insect growling at it under his um- 
brella of rose-leaf. No wiser is the man who 
grumbles under his gateway ; much less over 
his port wine. Very high-bred ladies would 
be startled to learn that they are doing a very 
vulgar thing (and hurting their tempers to 
boot) when they stand at a window, peevishly 
objecting to the rain, with such phrases as 
" Dear me ! how tiresome ! " — My lady's maid 
is not a bit less polite, when she vows and 
" purtests," that it is " quite contrary ;" — as if 
heaven had sent it on purpose to thwart her 
ladyship and her waiting-woman ! By complaint 
we dwindle and subject ourselves, make our- 
selves little-minded, and the slaves of circum- 
stance. By rising above an evil, we set it at a 
distance from us, render it a small object, and 
live in a nobler air. 

A wit, not unworthy to be named in the 
same page with the Dean of St. Patrick's, has 
given a good lesson on the subject, — Green, in 
his poem on the "Spleen," — a teacher the 
fittest in the world to be heard upon it, because 
he was subject to what he writes about, and 
overcame it by the cultivation of sense andgood- 

* A sedan. 



temper. Some bookseller with a taste, who 
deals in that species of publication, should give 
us a new edition of this poem, with engravings. 
Wilkie, Mulready, and others, might find sub- 
jects enough to furnish a design to every page. 

" In rainy days keep double guard, 
Or spleen will surely be too hard ; 
Which like thosefish by sailors met, 
Fly highest when their ivings are wet. 
In such dull weather so unfit 
To enterprise a work of wit, 
When clouds one yard of azure sky 
That's fit for simile deny, 
I dress my face with studious looks, 
And shorten tedious hours with books ; 
But if dull fogs invade the head, 
That mem'ry minds not what is read, 
I sit in windows dry as ark, 
And on the drowning world remark : 
Or to some coffee-house I stray 
For news, the manna of the day, 
And from the hipp'd discourses gather 
That politics go by the weather ; 
Then seek good-humour'd tavern-chums, 
And play at cards, but for small sums ; 
Or with the merry fellows quaff, 
And laugh aloud with them that laugh, 
Or drink a joco-serious cup 
With souls who've took their freedom up, 
And let my mind, beguiled by talk, 
In Epicurus' garden walk, 
Who thought it heaven to be serene ; 
Pain, hell ; and purgatory, spleen." 



XVIIL— THE EAST-WIND. 

Did anybody ever hear of the East- Wind 
w r hen he was a boy ? We remember no such 
thing. We never heard a word about it, all 
the time we were at school. There was the 
schoolmaster with his ferula, but there was no 
East- Wind. Our elders might have talked 
about it, but such calamities of theirs are in- 
audible in the ears of the juvenile. A fine 
day was a fine day, let the wind be in what 
quarter it might. While writing this article, 
we hear everybody complaining, that the fine 
weather is polluted by the presence of the 
East- Wind. It has lasted so long as to force 
itself upon people's attention. The ladies con- 
fess their exasperation with it, for making free 
without being agreeable ; and as ladies' quar- 
rels are to be taken up, and there is no other 
way of grappling with this invisible enemy, 
we have put ourselves in a state of Editorial 
resentment, and have resolved to write an 
article against it. 

The winds are among the most mysterious 
of the operations of the elements. We know 
not whence they come, or whither they go, — 
how they spring up, or how fall, — why they 
prevail so long, after such and such a fashion, 
in certain quarters ; nor, above all, why some 
of them should be at once so lasting and appa- 
rently so pernicious. We know some of their 
uses ; but there is a great deal about them we 
do not know, and it is difficult to put them to 
the question. As the sailor said of the ghosts, 



THE EAST WIND. 



43 



" we do not understand their tackle." What 
is very curious is, there seems to be one of 
them which prevails in some particular quarter, 
and has a character for malignity. In the 
South there is the Scirocco, an ugly customer, 
dark, close, suffocating, making melancholy ; 
which blots the sky, and dejects the spirits of 
the most lively. In the Oriental parts of the 
Earth, there is the Tifoon, supposed by some 
to be the Typhon, or Evil Principle of the 
ancients ; and in Europe we have the East- 
Wind, whom the ancients reckoned among 
the Sons of Typhon. The winds, Mr. Keightley 
tells us, were divided by the Greeks into 
"wholesome and noxious ; the former of which, 
Boreas (North- Wind), Zephyrus (West- Wind), 
and Notus (South- Wind), were, according to 
Hesiod, the children of Astrseus (Starry) and 
Eos (Dawn), The other winds, he says (pro- 
bably meaning only those who blow from the 
East), are the race of Typhoeus, whom he de- 
scribes as the last and most terrible child of 
Earth. In Greece, as over the rest of Europe, 
the East-Wind was pernicious." 

In England, the East- Wind is accounted 
pernicious if it last long ; and it is calculated, 
we believe, that it blows during three parts 
even of our fine weather. We have known a 
single blast of it blight a long row of plants in 
a greenhouse. Its effects upon the vegetable 
creation are sure to be visible if it last any 
time ; and it puts invalids into a very unplea- 
sant state, by drying the pores of the skin, and 
thus giving activity to those numerous internal 
disorders, of which none are more painful than 
what the moderns call nervousness, and our 
fathers understood by the name of the Vapours 
or the " Spleen," which, as Shenstone observed, 
is often little else than obstructed perspiration. 
An irritable poet exclaimed — 

" Scarce in a showerless day the heavens indulge 
Our melting clime, except the baleful East 
Withers the tender spring, and sourly checks 
The fancy of the year. Our fathers talk'd 
Of summers, balmy airs, and skies serene : 
Good Heaven ! for what unexpiated crimes 
This dismal change ?" — 

This terrible question we shall answer pre- 
sently. Meantime, the suffering poet may 
be allowed to have been a little irritated. It 
is certainly provoking to have this invisible 
enemy invading a whole nation at his will, 
and sending among us, for weeks together, his 
impertinent and cutting influence, drying up 
our skins, blowing dust in our eyes, con- 
tradicting our sunshine, smoking our suburbs, 
behaving boisterously to our women, aggra- 
vating our scolds, withering up our old gentle- 
men and ladies, nullifying the respite from 
smoke at Bow, perplexing our rooms between 
hot and cold, closing up our windows, exaspe- 
rating our rheumatisms, basely treating the 
wounds of our old soldiers, spoiling our gar- 
dens, preventing our voyages, assisting thereby 



our Bow-street runners, hurting our tempers, 
increasing our melancholies, deteriorating our 
night-airs, showing our wives' ankles, disorder- 
ing our little children, not being good for our 
beasts, perplexing our pantaloons (to know 
which to put on), deranging our ringlets, 
scarifying our eyes, thinning our apple-tarts, 
endangering our dances, getting damned our 
weathercocks, barbarizing our creditors, inca- 
pacitating our debtors, obstructing all moist 
processes in the arts, hindering our astro- 
nomers *, tiring our editors, and endangering 
our sales. 

The poet asks what crimes could have 
brought upon us the evils of our climate ? He 
should ask the school-boy that runs about, the 
gipsy who laughs at the climate, or the ghost 
of some old English yeoman, before taxes and 
sedentary living abounded. An East- Wind, 
like every other evil, except folly and ill inten- 
tion, is found, when properly grappled with, 
to be not only no evil, but a good, at least a 
negative one, sometimes a positive ; and even 
folly and ill intention are but the mistakes of 
a community in its progress from bad to good. 
How evil comes at all, we cannot say. It 
suffices us to believe, that it is in its nature 
fugitive ; and that it is the nature of good, 
when good returns, to outlast it beyond all 
calculation. If we led the natural lives to 
which we hope and believe that the advance 
of knowledge and comfort will bring us round, 
we should feel the East- Wind as little as the 
gipsies do : it would be the same refreshment 
to us that it is to the glowing school-boy, after 
his exercise ; and as to nipping our fruits and 
flowers, some living creature makes a dish of 
them, if we do not. With these considera- 
tions, we should be well content to recognise 
the concordia discors that harmonizes the inani- 
mate creation. If it were not for the East- 
Wind in this country, we should probably have 
too much wet. Our winters would not dry up ; 
our June fields would be impassable : we should 
not be able to enjoy the West- Wind itself, the 
Zephyr with his lap full of flowers. And upon 
the supposition that there is no peril in the 
East- Wind that may not ultimately be nulli- 
fied, we need not trouble ourselves with the 
question, why the danger of excessive moisture 
must be counteracted by a wind full of dry- 
ness. All the excesses of the elements will 
one day be pastime, for the healthy arms and 
discerning faculties of discovering man. 

And so we finish our vituperations in the 
way in which such things ought generally to 
be finished, with a discovery that the fault 
objected to is in ourselves, and renewed admi- 
ration of the abundance of promise in all the 
works of nature. 

* During East-Winds astronomers are unable to pursue 
their observations, on account of a certain hazy motion in 
the air. 



44 



STRAWBERRIES. 



XIX.—STRAWBERRIES. 

WRITTEN IN JUNE. 

If our article on this subject should be worth 
little (especially as we are obliged to be brief, 
and cannot bring to our assistance much quota- 
tion or other helps) we beg leave to say, that 
we mean to do little more in it than congratu- 
late the reader on the strawberry-season, and 
imply those pleasant interchanges of conven- 
tional sympathy, which give rise to the common 
expressions about the weather or the state of the 
harvest, — things which everybody knows what 
everybody else will say about them, and yet 
upon which everybody speaks. Such a charm 
has sympathy, even in its commonest aspect. 

A. — A fine day to-day. 

B. — Very fine day. 

A. — But I think we shall have rain. 

B. — I think we shall. 

And so the two speakers part, all the better 
pleased with one another merely for having 
uttered a few words, and those words such as 
either of them could have reckoned upon before- 
hand, and has interchanged a thousand times. 
And justly are they pleased. They are fellow- 
creatures living in the same world, and all its 
phases are of importance to them, and them- 
selves to one another. The meaning of the words 
is — " I feel as you do" — or " I am interested in 
the same subject, and it is a pleasure to me to 
let you see it." What a pity that mankind do 
not vent the same feelings of good-will and a 
mutual understanding on fifty other subjects ! 
And many do ;— but all might ; — and as Ben- 
tham says, " with how little trouble !" 

There is strawberry weather, for instance, which 
is as good a point of the weather to talk about, 
as rain, or sun. If the phrase seems a little 
forced, it is perhaps not so much as it seems ; 
for the weather, and fruit, and colour, and the 
birds, &c. &c, all hang together ; and for our 
parts, we would fain think, and can easily 
believe, that without this special degree of heat 
(while we are writing), or mixture of heat and 
fresh air, the strawberries would not have their 
special degree of colour and fragrance. The 
world answers to the spirit that plays upon it, 
as musical instruments to musician ; and if 
cloud, sunshine, and breeze (the fine playing of 
nature) did not descend upon earth precisely as 
they do at this moment, there is good reason 
to conclude, that neither fruit, nor anything 
else, would be precisely what it is. The 
cuckoo would want tone, and the strawberries 
relish. 

Do you not like, reader, the pottle of straw- 
berries ? And is it not manifest, from old habit 
and association, that no other sort of basket 
would do as well for their first arrival ? It 
"carries" well: it lies on your arm like a 
length of freshness ; then there is the slight 
paper covering, the slighter rush tie, the inner 
covering of leaves ; and when all these give 



place, fresh, and fragrant, and red lie the 
berries, — the best, it is to be feared, at the top. 
Now and then comes a half-mashed one, sweet 
in its over-ripeness ; and when the fingers 
cannot conveniently descend further, the rest, 
urged by a beat on the flat end, are poured out 
on a plate ; and perhaps agreeably surprise us 
with the amount. — Meantime the fingers and 
nails have got coloured as with wine. 

What matter of fact is this ! And how 
everybody knows it ! And yet for that very 
reason, it is welcome ; like the antiquities about 
the weather. So abundant is Nature in supply- 
ing us with entertainment, even by means of 
simply stating that anything is what it is! 
Paint a strawberry in oil, and provided the re- 
presentation be true, how willing is everybody 
to like it ! And observe, even in a smaller 
matter, how Nature heaps our resources one 
upon another, — first giving us the thing, then 
the representation of it, or power of painting 
it, (for art is nature also,) then the power of 
writing about it, the power of thinking, the 
power of giving, of receiving, and fifty others. 
Nobles put the leaves in their coronets. Poets 
make them grow for ever, where they are no 
longer to be found. We never pass by Ely- 
place, in Holborn, without seeing the street 
there converted into a garden, and the pave- 
ment to rows of strawberries. 

." My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, 
I saw good strawberries in your garden there ; 
I do beseech you send for some of them" — 

quoth Richard the Third to the Bishop, in that 
scene of frightful calmness and smooth-speak- 
ing, which precedes his burst of thunder 
against Hastings. Richard is gone with his 
bad passions, and the garden is gone ; but the 
tyrant is converted into poetry, and the straw- 
berries also ; and here we have them both, 
equally harmless. 

Sir John Suckling, in his richly-coloured 
portrait of a beautiful girl, in the tragedy of 
Brennoralt, has made their dying leaves pre- 
cious : — 

" Eyes full and quick, 
With breath as sweet as double violets, 
And wholesome as dying leaves of strawberries." 

Strawberries deserve all the good things that 
can be said of them. They are beautiful to 
look at, delicious to eat, have a fine odour, 
and are so wholesome, that they are said to 
agree with the weakest digestions, and to be 
excellent against gout, fever, and all sorts of 
ailments. It is recorded of Fontenelle that 
he attributed his longevity to them, in con- 
sequence of their having regularly cooled a 
fever which he had every spring ; and that he 
used to say, " If I can but reach the season of 
strawberries !" Boerhaave (Mr. Phillips tells us 
in his " History of Fruits,") looked upon their 
continued use as one of the principal remedies 
in cases of obstruction and viscidity, and in 






THE WAITER. 



45 



putrid disorders : Hoffman furnished instances 
of obstinate disorders cured by them, even con- 
sumptions ; and Linnaeus says that by eating 
plentifully of them, he kept himself free from 
the gout. They are good even for the teeth. 

A fruit so very useful and delightful deserves 
a better name ; though the old one is now so 
identified with its beauty, that it would be a 
pity to get rid of it. Nobody thinks of straw, 
when uttering the word strawberry, but only 
of colour, fragrance and sweetness. The Italian 
name is Fragola, — fragrant. The English one 
originated in the custom of putting straw be- 
tween the fruit and the ground, to keep it dryand 
clean ; or perhaps, as Mr. Phillips thinks, from 
a still older practice among children , of threading 
the wild berries upon straws of grass. He says, 
that this is still a custom in parts of England 
where they abound, and that so many " straws 
of berries" are sold for a penny. 

One of the most luxurious of simple dishes is 
strawberries and cream. The very sound of the 
words seems to set one's page floating like a 
bowl. But there is an Italian poet, who has 
written a whole poem upon strawberries, and 
who, with all his love of them, will not hear of 
them without sugar. He invokes them before 
him in all their beauty, which he acknowledges 
with enthusiasm, and then tells them, like some 
capricious sultan, that he does not choose to see 
their faces. They must hide them, he says : — 
put on their veils, — to wit, of sugar. "Straw- 
berries and sugar" are to him what " sack and 
sugar" was to Falstaff, the indispensable com- 
panions, the sovereign remedy for all evil — the 
climax of good. He finds fault with Moliere's 
" Imaginary sick Man" for not hating them ; 
since, if he had eaten them, they would have 
cured his hypochondria. As to himself, he 
talks of them as Fontenelle would have talked, 
had he written Italian verse : — 

Io per me d'esse, a boccon ricchi e doppi 
Spesso rigonfio, e rinconforto il seno ; 
E brontolando per dispetto scoppi 
Quel vecchio d' lppocrasso e di Galeno, 
Che i giulebbi, 1' essenzie, ed i sciloppi 
Abborro, come V ostico veleno ; 
E di Fragole un' avida satolla 
Mi purga il sangue, e awiva ogni midolla, 

For my part, I confess I fairly swill 

And stuff myself with strawberries : and abuse 

The doctors all the while, draught, powder, and pill, 

And wonder how any sane head can choose 

To have their nauseous jalaps, and their bill, 

All which, like so much poison, I refuse. 

Give me a glut of strawberries : and lo ! 

Sweet through my blood, and very bones, they go. 

Almost all the writers of Italy who have 
been worth anything, have been writers of 
verse at one time or another. — Prose- writers, 
historians, philosophers, doctors of law and 
medicine, clergymen, — all have contributed 
their quota to the sweet art. The poet of the 
strawberries was a Jesuit, a very honest man 
too, notwithstanding the odium upon his order's 



name, and a grave, eloquent, and truly christian 
theologian, of a life recorded as " evangelical." 
It is delightful to see what playfulness such a 
man thought not inconsistent with the most 
sacred aspirations. The strawberry to him had 
its merits in the creation, as well as the star ; 
and he knew how to give each its due. Nay, 
he runs the joke down, like a humourist who 
could do nothing else but joke if he pleased, but 
gracefully withal, and with a sense of Nature 
above his Art, like a true lover of poetry. 
His poem is in two cantos, and contains up- 
wards of nine hundred lines, ending in the 
following bridal climax, which the good Jesuit 
seems to have considered the highest one pos- 
sible, and the very cream even of strawberries 
and sugar. He has been apostrophising two 
young friends of his, newly married, of the 
celebrated Venetian families Mocenigo and 
Loredano, and this is the blessing with which 
he concludes, pleasantly smiling at the end of 
his gravity : — 

A questa coppia la serena pace 

Eternamente intorno scherzi e voli : 

E la ridente sanita vivace 

La sua vita longhissima consoli ; 

E la felicita pura e verace, 

Non dal suo fianco un solo di s' involi ; 

E a dire che ogni cosa lieta vada, 

Su le Fragole il zucchero le cada. 

Around this loving pair may joy serene 
On wings of balm for ever wind and play ; 
And laughing Health her roses shake between, 
Making their life one long, sweet, flowery way ; 
May bliss, true bliss, pure, self-possess'd of mien, 
Be absent from their side, no, not a day ; 
In short, to sum up all that earth can prize, 
May they have sugar to their strawberries. 



XX.-THE WAITER. 

Going into the City the other day upon 
business, we took a chop at a tavern, and re- 
newed our acquaintance, after years of inter- 
ruption, with that swift and untiring personage, 
yclept a waiter. We mention this long interval 
of acquaintance, in order to account for any 
deficiencies that maybe found in our description 
of him. Our readers perhaps will favour us 
with a better. He is a character before the 
public : thousands are acquainted with him, 
and can fill up the outline. But we felt irre- 
sistibly impelled to sketch him ; like a portrait- 
painter who comes suddenly upon an old friend, 
or upon an old servant of the family. 

We speak of the waiter properly and gene- 
rally so called, — the representative of the whole, 
real, official race, — and not of the humourist 
or other eccentric genius occasionally to be 
found in it, — moving out of the orbit of tranquil 
but fiery waiting, — not absorbed, — not devout 
towards us, — not silent or monosyllabical ; — 
fellows that affect a character beyond that of 



46 



THE WAITER. 



waiter, and get spoiled in club-rooms, and 
places of theatrical resort. 

Your thorough waiter has no ideas out of 
the sphere of his duty and the business ; and 
yet he is not narrow-minded either. He sees 
too much variety of character for that, and 
has to exercise too much consideration for the 
" drunken gentleman." But his world is the 
tavern, and all mankind but its visitors. His 
female sex are the maid-servants and his young 
mistress, or the widow. If he is ambitious, he 
aspires to marry one of the two latter : if other- 
wise, and Molly is prudent, he does not know 
but he may carry her off some day to be mistress 
of the Golden Lion at Chinksford, where he will 
" show off" in the eyes of Betty Laxon who 
refused him. He has no feeling of noise itself 
but as the sound of dining, or of silence but as 
a thing before dinner. Even a loaf with him 
is hardly a loaf ; it is so many " breads." His 
longest speech is the making out of a bill viva 
voce — " Two beefs — one potatoes — three ales — 
two wines — six and twopence" — which he does 
with an indifferent celerity, amusing to new- 
comers who have been relishing their fare, and 
not considering it as a mere set of items. He 
attributes all virtues to everybody, provided 
they are civil and liberal ; and of the existence 
of some vices he has no notion. Gluttony, for 
instance, with him, is not only inconceivable, 
but looks very like a virtue. He sees in it 
only so many more " beefs," and a generous 
scorn of the bill. As to wine, or almost any 
other liquor, it is out of your power to astonish 
him with the quantity you call for. His "Yes 
Sir" is as swift, indifferent, and official, at the 
fifth bottle as at the first. Reform and other 
public events he looks upon purely as things 
in the newspaper, and the newspaper as a thing- 
taken in at taverns, for gentlemen to read. 
His own reading is confined to "Accidents 
and Offences," and the advertisements for But- 
lers, which latter he peruses with an admiring 
fear, not choosing to give up "a certainty." 
When young, he was always in a hurry, and 
exasperated his mistress by running against 
the other waiters, and breaking the " neguses." 
As he gets older, he learns to unite swiftness 
with caution ; declines wasting his breath in 
immediate answers to calls ; and knows, with 
a slight turn of his face, and elevation of his 
voice, into what precise corner of the room to 
pitch his " Coming, Sir." If you told him that, 
in Shakspeare's time, waiters said "Anon, anon, 
Sir," he would be astonished at the repetition 
of the same word in one answer, and at the 
use of three words instead of two ; and he 
would justly infer, that London could not have 
been so large, nor the chop-houses so busy, in 
those days. He would drop one of the two syl- 
lables of his " Yes, Sir," if he could ; but busi- 
ness and civility will not allow it ; and therefore 
he does what he can by running them together 
in the swift sufficiency of his "Yezzir." 



"Thomas!" 

" Yezzir." 

" Is my steak coming ?" 

"Yezzir." 

"And the pint of port?" 

" Yezzir." 

" You'll not forget the postman ? " 

« Yezzir." 
For in the habit of his acquiescence Thomas ! 
not seldom says " Yes, Sir," for " No, Sir," the ' 
habit itself rendering him intelligible. 

His morning dress is a waistcoat or jacket ; 
his coat is for afternoons. If the establishment 
is flourishing, he likes to get into black as he 
grows elderly ; by which time also he is gene- 
rally a little corpulent, and wears hair-powder, 
dressing somewhat laxly about the waist, for 
convenience of movement. Not however that 
he draws much upon that part of his body, 
except as a poise to what he carries ; for you 
may observe that a waiter, in walking, uses only 
his lowest limbs, from his knees downwards. 
The movement of all the rest of him is nega- 
tive, and modified solely by what he bears in 
his hands. At this period he has a little money 
in the funds, and his nieces look up to him. 
He still carries however a napkin under his 
arm, as well as a corkscrew in his pocket ; nor, 
for all his long habit, can he help feeling a 
satisfaction at the noise he makes in drawing 
a cork. He thinks that no man can do it 
better ; and that Mr. Smith, who understands 
wine, is thinking so too, though he does not 
take his eyes off the plate. In his right waist- 
coat pocket is a snuff-box, with which he 
supplies gentlemen late at night, after the 
shops are shut up, and when they are in despe- 
rate want of another fillip to their sensations, 
after the devil and toasted cheese. If particu- 
larly required, he will laugh at a joke, especially 
at that time of night, justly thinking that gen- 
tlemen towards one in the morning " icill be 
facetious." He is of opinion it is in " human 
nature " to be a little fresh at that period, and 
to want to be put into a coach. 

He announces his acquisition of property by 
a bunch of seals to his watch, and perhaps rings 
on his fingers ; one of them a mourning ring 
left him by his late master, the other a present, 
either from his nieces' father, or from some 
ultra-good-natured old gentleman whom he 
helped into a coach one night, and who had 
no silver about him. 

To see him dine, somehow, hardly seems 
natural. And he appears to do it as if he had 
no right. You catch him at his dinner in a 
corner,— huddled apart,— " Thomas dining!" 
instead of helping dinner. One fancies that 
the stewed and hot meats and the constant 
smoke, ought to be too much for him, and that 
he should have neither appetite nor time for 
such a meal. 

Once a year (for he has few holidays) a 
couple of pedestrians meet him on a Sunday 



"THE BUTCHER.' 



47 



in the fields, and cannot conceive for the life 
of them who it is ; till the startling recollection 
occurs — " Good God ! It's the waiter at the 
Grogram ! " 



XXI.— "THE BUTCHER." 

BUTCHERS AND JURIES. — BUTLER'S DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH 
DRAMA, &C. 

It was observed by us the other day in a 
journal that " butchers are wisely forbidden to 
be upon juries ; not because they are not as 
good as other men by nature, and often as 
truly kind ; but because the habit of taking 
away the lives of sheep and oxen inures them 
to the sight of blood, and violence, and mortal 
pangs." 

The " Times," in noticing this passage, cor- 
rected our error. There neither is, nor ever 
was, it seems, a law forbidding butchers to 
be upon juries ; though the reverse opinion 
has so prevailed among all classes, that Locke 
takes it for granted in his " Treatise on Educa- 
tion," and our own authority was the author of 
" Hudibras," a man of very exact and universal 
knowledge. The passage that was in our 
mind is in his " Posthumous Works," and is 
worth quoting on other accounts. He is 
speaking of those pedantic and would-be 
classical critics who judge the poets of one 
nation by those of another. Butler's resist- 
ance of their pretensions is the more honour- 
able to him, inasmuch as the prejudices of his 
own education, and even the propensity of his 
genius, lay on the learned and anti-impulsive 
side. But his judgment was thorough-going and 
candid. — The style is of the off-hand careless 
order, after the fashion of the old satires and 
epistles, though not so rough : — 

• ' An English poet should he tried hy his peers, 

And not by pedants and philosophers, 

Incompetent to judge poetic fury, 

As butchers are forbid to be of a jury, 

Besides the most intolerable wrong 

To try their masters in a foreign tongue, 

By foreign jurymen like Sophocles, 

Or tales* falser than Euripides, 

When not an English native dares appear 

To be a witness for the prisoner, — 

When all the laws they use to arraign and try 

The innocent, and wrong'd delinquent by, 

Were made by a foreign lawyer and his pupils, 

To put an end to all poetic scruples ; 

And by the advice of virtuosi Tuscans, 

Determined all the doubts of 60cks and buskins, — 



* Tales (Latin) persons chosen to supply the place of 
men impannelled upon a jury or inquest, and not appear- 
ing when called. [We copy this from a very useful and 
pregnant volume, called the "Treasury of Knowledge," 
full of such heaps of information as are looked for in lists 
and vocabularies, and occupying the very margins with 
proverbs. Mr. Disraeli, sen., objects to this last overflow 
of contents, but not, we think, with his usual good sense 
and gratitude, as a lover of books. These proverbial sayings, 
which are the most universal things in the world, appear 
to us to have a particularly good effect in thus coming in 
to refresh one among the technicalities of knowledge.] 



Gave judgment on all past and future plays, 

As is apparent by Speroni's casef, 

Which Lope Vega first began to steal, 

And after him the Yvenc\v filout Corneille ; 

And since, our English plagiaries nim 

And steal their far-fetch 'd criticisms from him, 

And by an action, falsely laid of trover§, 

The lumber for their proper goods recover, 

Enough to furnish all the lewd impeachers 

Of witty Beaumont's poetry and Fletcher's, 

Who for a few misprisions of wit, 

Are charged by those who ten times worse commit, 

And for misjudging some unhappy scenes, 

Are censured for it with more unlucky sense : 

(How happily said !) 

When all their worst miscarriages delight 

And please more than the best that pedants write." 

Having been guilty of this involuntary 
scandal against the butchers, we would fain 
make them amends by saying nothing but 
good of them and their trade ; and truly if we 
find the latter part of the proposition a little 
difficult, they themselves are for the most part 
a jovial, good-humoured race, and can afford 
the trade to be handled as sharply as their 
beef on the block. There is cut and come 
again in them. Your butcher breathes an 
atmosphere of good living. The beef mingles 
kindly with his animal nature. He grows fat 
with the best of it, perhaps with inhaling its 
very essence ; and has no time to grow spare, 
theoretical, and hypochondriacal, like those 
whose more thinking stomachs drive them 
upon the apparently more innocent but less easy 
and analogous intercommunications of fruit and 
vegetables. For our parts, like all persons 
who think at all, — nay, like the butcher him- 
self, when he catches himself in a strange fit 
of meditation, after some doctor perhaps has 
"kept him low," we confess to an abstract 
dislike of eating the sheep and lamb that we 
see in the meadow ; albeit our concrete regard 
for mutton is considerable, particularly Welsh 
mutton. But Nature has a beautiful way of 
reconciling all necessities that are unmalig- 
nant ; and as butchers at present must exist, 
and sheep and lambs would not exist at all in 
civilised countries, and crop the sweet grass so 
long, but for the brief pang at the end of it, 
he is as comfortable a fellow as can be, — one 
of the liveliest ministers of her mortal necessi- 
ties, — of the deaths by which she gives and 
diversifies life ; and has no more notion of 
doing any harm in his vocation, than the lamb 
that swallows the lady-bird on the thyme. A 
very pretty insect is she, and has had a pretty 
time of it ; a very calm, clear feeling, healthy, 
and, therefore, happy little woollen giant, com- 

t Speroni, a celebrated critic in the days of Tasso. 

$ Filou — pickpocket ! This irreverent epithet must have 
startled many of Butler's readers and brother-loyalists of 
the court of Charles the Second. But he suffered nothing 
to stand in the way of what seemed to him a just opinion. 

§ Trover— an action for goods found and not delivered on 
demand.— Treasury of Knowledge. Butler's wit dragged 
every species of information into his net. 



48 



A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



pared with her, is the lamb, — her butcher ; and 
an equally innocent and festive personage is 
the butcher himself, notwithstanding the popu- 
lar fallacy about juries, and the salutary mis- 
giving his beholders feel when they see him 
going to take the lamb out of the meadow, or 
entering the more tragical doors of the slaughter- 
house. His thoughts, while knocking down 
the ox, are of skill and strength, and not of 
cruelty. And the death, though it may not 
be the very best of deaths, is, assuredly, none 
of the worst. Animals, that grow old in 
an artificial state, would have a hard time of 
it in a lingering decay. Their mode of life 
would not have prepared them for it. Their 
blood would not run lively enough to the last. 
We doubt even whether the John Bull of the 
herd, when about to be killed, would change 
places with a very gouty, irritable old gentle- 
man ; or be willing to endure a grievous being 
of his own sort, with legs answering to the 
gout ; much less if Cow were to grow old with 
him, and plague him with endless lowings, 
occasioned by the loss of her beauty, and the 
increasing insipidity of the hay. A human 
being who can survive those ulterior vaccina- 
tions must indeed possess some great reliefs 
of his own, and deserve them, and life may 
reasonably be a wonderfully precious thing in 
his eyes ; nor shall excuse be wanting to the 
vaccinators, and what made them such, espe- 
cially if they will but grow a little more quiet 
and ruminating. But who would have the 
death of some old, groaning, aching, effeminate, 
frightened, lingerer in life, such as Msecenas 
for example, compared with a good, jolly knock- 
down blow, at a reasonable period, whether of 
hatchet or of apoplexy, — whether the bull's 
death or the butcher's ? Our own preference, 
it is true, is for neither. We are for an excel- 
lent, healthy, happy life, of the very best sort ; 
and a death to match it, going out calmly as a 
summer's evening. Our taste is not particular. 
But we are for the knock-down blow, rather 
than the death-in-life. 

The butcher, when young, is famous for his 
health, strength, and vivacity, and for his 
riding any kind of horse down any sort of hill, 
with a tray before him, the reins for a whip, 
and no hat on his head. It was a gallant of 
this sort that Robin Hood imitated, when he 
beguiled the poor Sheriff into the forest, and 
showed him his own deer to sell. The old 
ballads apostrophise him well as the " butcher 
so bold," or better— with the accent on the last 
syllable, " thou bold butcher." No syllable of 
his was to be trifled with. The butcher keeps 
up his health in middle life, not only with the 
food that seems so congenial to flesh, but with 
rising early in the morning, and going to 
market with his own or his master's cart. 
When more sedentary, and very jovial and 
good-humoured, he is apt to expand into a 
most analogous state of fat and smoothness, 



with silken tones and a short breath, — harbin- 
gers, we fear, of asthma and gout ; or the 
kindly apoplexy comes, and treats him as he 
treated the ox. 

When rising in the world, he is indefatigable 
on Saturday nights, walking about in the front 
of those white-clothed and joint-abounding 
open shops, while the meat is being half-cooked 
beforehand with the gas-lights. The rapidity 
of his " What-d'ye-buy ? " on these occasions is 
famous ; and both he and the good housewives, 
distracted with the choice before them, pro- 
nounce the legs of veal "beautiful — exceed- 
ingly." 

How he endures the meat against his head, 
as he carries it about on a tray, or how we 
endure that he should do it, or how he can 
handle the joints as he does with that habitual 
indifference, or with what floods of hot water 
he contrives to purify himself of the exoterical 
part of his philosophy on going to bed, we 
cannot say ; but take him all in all, he is a fine 
specimen of the triumph of the general over 
the particular. 

The only poet that was the son of a butcher 
(and the trade may be proud of him) is Aken- 
side, who naturally resorted to the " Pleasures 
of Imagination." As to Wolsey, we can never 
quite picture him to ourselves apart from the 
shop. He had the cardinal butcher's-virtue of 
a love of good eating, as his picture shows ; 
and he was foreman all his life to the butcher 
Henry the Eighth. We beg pardon of the 
trade for this application of their name : and 
exhort them to cut the cardinal, and stick to 
the poet. 



XXII—A PINCH OF SNUFF. 

Will the reader take a pinch of snuff with 
us? 

Reader. With pleasure. 

Editor. How do you like it ? 

Reader. Extremely fine ? I never saw such 
snuff. 

Editor. Precisely so. It is of the sort they call 
Invisible — or as the French have it, tabac ima- 
ginaire — Imaginary snuff. No macuba equals 
it. The tonquin bean has a coarse flavour in 
comparison. To my thinking it has the hue of 
Titian's orange colour, and the very tip of the 
scent of sweet-brier. 

Reader. In fact, one may perceive in it just 
what one pleases, — or nothing at all. 

Editor. Exactly that. 

Reader. Those who take no snuff whatever, 
or even hate it, may take this and be satisfied. 
Ladies, nay brides, may take it. 

Editor. You apprehend the delicacy of it to 
a nicety. You will allow, nevertheless, by 
virtue of the same fineness of perception, that 
even when you discern, or choose to discern, 
neither hue, scent nor substance in it, still 



A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



40 



there is a very sensible pleasure realised, the 
moment the pinch is offered. 

Reader. True, the good-will — that which is 
passing between us two now. 

Editor. You have it — that which loosens the 
tongues of people in omnibuses, and helps to 
thaw even the frozen-heartedness of diplo- 
macy. 

Reader. I beg your pardon for a moment, — 
but is thaw, my dear sir, the best word you 
could have chosen ? Snvff can hardly be said to 
thaw. 

Editor. {Aside. This it is to set readers upon 
being critical, and help them to beat their 
teachers.) You are right — "What shall we say ? 
To dissipate — to scatter — to make evaporate ? 
To blow up in a sneeze ? 

Reader. I will leave you to judge of that. 
Editor. {Aside. His politeness is equal to his 
criticism. Oh, penny, two-penny, and three- 
halfpenny " trash !" You will end in ruining 
the trade of your inventors !) My dear reader, 
I wish I could give you snuff made of the 
finest Brazil, in a box of diamond. But good- 
will is the flower of all snuff-taking ; and 
luckily a pinch of that may be taken equally as 
well out of horn, or of invisible wood, as of the 
gifts of emperors. This is the point I was 
going to speak of. The virtues of snuff itself 
may be doubted ; but the benevolence of an 
offered pinch and the gratitude of an accepted 
one, are such good things, and snuff-takers 
have so many occasions of interchanging these, 
that it is a question whether the harm of the 
self-indulgence (if any) is not to be allowed for 
the sake of the social benefit. 

A grave question ! Let us consider it a little, 
with the seriousness becoming snuff-takers, 
real or imaginary. They are a reflecting race ; 
no men know better that everything is not a 
i trifle which appears to be such in uncleared 
eyes ; any more than everything is grand which 
is of serious aspect or dimensions. A snuff- 
! taker looks up at some mighty error, takes his 
! pinch, and shakes the imposture, like the rem- 
i nant of the pinch, to atoms, with one "flesh- 
quake " of head, thumb, and indifference. He 
also looks into some little nicety of question 
or of creation, — of the intellectual or visible 
world, — and, having sharpened his eyesight 
with another pinch, and put his brain into 
proper cephalick condition, discerns it, as it 
were, microscopically, and pronounces that 
there is " more in it than the un-smiff-taking 
would suppose." 

We agree with him. The mere fancy of apinch 
of snuff, at this moment, enables us to look 
upon divers worlds of mistake in the history of 
man but as so many bubbles, breaking, or 
about to break ; while the pipe out of which 
they were blown, assumes all its real supe- 
riority in the hands of the grown smoker, — the 
superiority of peace and quiet over war and 
childish dispute. An atom of good-will is 



worth an emperor's snuff-box. We happened 
once to be compelled to moot a point of no very 
friendly sort with a stranger whom we never 
saw before, of whom we knew nothing, and 
whose appearance in the matter we conceived 
to be altogether unwarrantable. At one of 
the delicatest of all conjunctures in the ques- 
tion, and when he presented himself in his 
most equivocal light, what should he do, but 
with the best air in the world take out a 
snuff-box, and offer us the philanthropy of a 
pinch ? We accepted it with as grave a face 
as it was offered ; but, secretly, the appeal was 
irresistible. It was as much as to say — " Ques- 
tions may be mooted — doubts of all sorts en- 
tertained — people are thrown into strange situ- 
ations in this world — but abstractedly, what 
is anything worth compared with a quiet mo- 
ment, and a resolution to make the best of a 
perplexity?" Ever afterwards, whenever the 
thought of this dispute came into our recol- 
lection, the bland idea of the snuff-box always 
closed our account with it ; and our good- 
will survived, though our perplexity remained 
also. 

But this is only a small instance of what 
must have occurred thousands of times in 
matters of dispute. Many a fierce impulse of 
hostility must have been allayed by no greater 
a movement. Many a one has been caused by 
less ! A few years ago, a petition was presented 
to the House of Commons on the subject of 
duelling ; by which it appeared, that people 
have challenged and killed one another for 
words about "geese " and "anchovies," and "a 
glass of wine." Nay, one person was compelled 
to fight about our very peace-maker, " a pinch 
of snuff." But if so small are the causes of 
deadly offence, how often must they not have 
been removed by the judicious intervention of 
the pinch itself ? The geese, anchovies, glass 
of wine and all, might possibly have been 
made harmless by a aozen grains of Havan- 
nah. The handful of dust with which the 
Latin poet settles his wars of the bees, was 
the type of the pacifying magic of the snuff- 
box: — 

Hi motus animorum, atque heec certamina tanta, 
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent. 

These movements of high minds, these mortal foes, 
Give but a pinch of dust, and you compose. 

Yet snuff-taking is an odd custom. If we 
came suddenly upon it in a foreign country, it 
would make us split our sides with laughter. 
A grave gentleman takes a little casket out of 
his pocket, puts a finger and thumb in, brings 
away a pinch of a sort of powder, and then, 
with the most serious air possible, as if he was 
doing one of the most important actions of his 
life (for even with the most indifferent snuff- 
takers there is a certain look of importance), 
proceeds to thrust, and keep thrusting it, at 
his nose ! after which he shakes his head, or 



59 



A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



his waistcoat, or his nose itself, or all three, in 
the style of a man who has done his duty, and 
satisfied the most serious claims of his well- 
being. What should we say to this custom 
among the inhabitants of a newly-discovered 
island ? And to provoke the poor nose in this 
manner ! and call people's attention to it ! A 
late physician, whom we had the pleasure of 
knowing, and who had a restless temperament, 
used to amuse us, as he sat pondering in his 
chair, with taking up a pair of scissors, and 
delicately poking the tip of his tongue with 
it, — thus taking delight in the borders of 
an uneasy sensation, for want of a better. We 
have often thought, that a snuff-taker, fond of 
a potent snuff, might as well addict himself to 
the doctor's scissors ; or puncture any other 
part of his face with a fork at once. Elegant 
fork-takers might have boxes with little instru- 
ments made accordingly, and politely offer 
them to the company to poke their cheeks 
with. Or they might hover about the eyes ; 
or occasionally practise some slight scarifica- 
tion. Bleeding is accounted cephalick. 

It is curious to see the various modes in 
which people take snuff. Some do it by little 
fits and starts, and get over the thing quickly. 
These are epigrammatic snuff-takers, who 
come to the point as fast as possible, and to 
whom the pungency is every tiling. They 
generally use a sharp and severe snuff, — a sort 
of essence of pins' points. Others are all ur- 
banity and polished demeanour ; they value 
the style as much as the sensation, and offer 
the box around them as much out of dignity 
as benevolence. Some take snuff irritably, 
others bashfully, others in a manner as dry 
as the snuff itself, generally with an economy 
of the vegetable ; others, with a luxuriance 
of gesture, and a lavishness of supply, that 
announces a moister article, and sheds its 
superfluous honours over neckcloth and coat. 
Dr. Johnson's was probably a snuff of this 
kind. He used to take it out of his waistcoat- 
pocket instead of a box. There is a species 
of long-armed snuff-taker, that performs the 
operation in a style of potent and elaborate 
preparation, ending with a sudden activity. 
But smaller and rounder men sometimes 
attempt it. He first puts his head on one 
side ; then stretches forth the arm, with pinch 
in hand ; then brings round his hand, as a 
snuff-taking elephant might his trunk ; and, 
finally, shakes snuff, head, and nose together, 
in a sudden vehemence of convulsion. His 
eyebrows all the while are lifted up, as if to 
make the more room for the onset ; and when 
he has ended, he draws himself back to his 
perpendicular, and generally proclaims the 
victory he has won over the insipidity of 
the previous moment, by a sniff, and a great 
"Hah!" 



XXIII.—A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



CONCLUDED. 



From the respect which we showed in our 
last to scented snuffs, and from other indica- 
tions which will doubtless have escaped us in 
our ignorance of his art, the scientific snuff- 
taker will have concluded that we are no 
brother of the box. And he will be right. But 
we hope we only give the greater proof thereby 
of the toleration that is in us, and our wish not 
to think ill of a practice merely because it is 
not our own. We confess we are inclined to a 
charitable regard, nay, provided it be hand- 
somely and cleanly managed, to a certain 
respect, for snuff-taking, out of divers consider- 
ations : first, as already noticed, because it 
helps to promote good- will : second, because 
we have known some very worthy snuff-takers : 
third, out of our regard for the snuff-taking 
times of Queen Anne, and the wits of France : 
and last, because in the benevolence, and ima- 
ginativeness, and exceeding width of our phi- 
losophy (which fine terms we apply to it, in 
order to give a hint to those who might con- 
sider it a weakness and superstition,) — because 
we have a certain veneration for all great 
events and prevailing customs, that have given 
a character to the history of society in the 
course of ages. It would be hard to get us to 
think contemptuously of the mummies of 
Egypt, of the ceremoniousness of the Chinese, 
of the betel-nut of the Turks and Persians, nay, 
of the garlic of the South of Europe ; and so 
of the tea-drinking, coffee- drinking, tobacco- 
smoking, and snuff-taking, which have come to 
us from the Eastern and American nations. 
We know not what great providential uses 
there might be in such customs ; or what worse 
or more frivolous things they prevent, till the 
time comes for displacing them. " The wind 
bloweth where it listeth ;" and so, for aught 
we know, doth the " cloud " of the tobacco- 
pipe. We are resolved, for our parts, not to 
laugh with the " scorner," but even to make 
merry with submission ; nay, to undermine 
(when we feel compelled to do so) with absolute 
tenderness to the thing dilapidated. Let the 
unphilosophic lover of tobacco (if there be such 
a person), to use a phrase of his own, "put that 
in his pipe and smoke it." 

But there is one thing that puzzles us in the 
history of the Indian weed and its pulverisa- 
tion ; and that is, how lovers, and ladies, ever 
came to take snuff. In England, perhaps, it 
was never much done by the latter, till they 
grew too old to be "particular," or thought 
themselves too sure of their lovers ; but in 
France, where the animal spirits think less of 
obstacles in the way of inclination, and where 
the resolution to please and be pleased is, or 
was, of a fancy less nice and more accommo- 
dating, we are not aware that the ladies in the 
time of the Voltaires and Du Chatelets ever 



A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



thought themselves either too old to love, or 
too young to take snuff. We confess, whether 
it is from the punctilios of a colder imagination, 
or the perils incidental to a warmer one, that 
although we are interested in comprehending 
the former privilege, we never could do the 
same with the latter. A bridegroom in one of 
the periodical essayists, describing his wife's 
fondness for rouge and carmine, complains that 
he can never make pure, unsophisticated way to 
her cheek, but is obliged, like Pyramus in the 
story, to kiss through a wall, — to salute through 
a crust of paint and washes : 

" Wall, vile wall, which did those lovers sunder." 

This is bad enough ; and, considering perhaps 
a due healthiness of skin, worse ; yet the object 
of paint is to imitate health and loveliness ; 
the wish to look well is in it. But snuff !— 
Turtle-doves don't take snuff. A kiss is surely 
not a thing to be " sneezed at." 

Fancy two lovers in the time of Queen Anne, 
or Louis the Fifteenth, each with snuff-box in 
hand, who have just come to an explanation, 
and who in the hurry of their spirits have un- 
thinkingly taken a pinch, just at the instant 
when the gentleman is going to salute the lips 
of his mistress. He does so, finds his honest 
love as frankly returned, and is in the act of 
bringing out the words, " Charming creature," 
when a sneeze overtakes him J 

" Cha - Cha - Cha - Charming creature! " 

What a situation ! A sneeze ! O Venus, 
where is such a thing in thy list ? 

The lady, on her side, is under the like mal- 
apropos influence, and is obliged to divide one 
of the sweetest of all bashful and loving speeches, 
with the shock of the sneeze respondent : — 

" Oh, Richard ! Sho - Sho - Sho - Should you 
think ill of me for this ! " 

Imagine it. 

We have nothing to say against the sneeze 
abstract. In all nations it seems to have been 
counted of great significance, and worth re- 
spectful attention, whether advising us of good 
or ill. Hence the " God bless you," still heard 
among us when people sneeze ; and the " Feli- 
citii" (Good luck to you) of the Italians. A 
Latin poet, in one of his most charming effu- 
sions, though not, we conceive, with the delicacy 
of a Greek, even makes Cupid sneeze at sight 
of the happiness of two lovers : 

Hoc ut dixit, Amor, sinistram ut ante, 
Dextram sternuit approbationem. 

Catullus. 

Love, at this charming speech and sight, 
Sneezed his sanction from the right. 

But he does not make the lovers sneeze. That 
omen remained for the lovers of the snuff-box ; 
people more social than nice. 

We have no recollection of any self-misgiv- 
ing in this matter on the part of the male sex, 
during the times we speak of. They are a race, 



who have ever thought themselves warranted 
in taking liberties which they do not allow 
their gentler friends ; and we cannot call to 
mind any passage in the writings of the French or 
English wits in former days, implying the least 
distrust of his own right, and propriety, and 
charmingness in taking snuff, on the part of the 
gentleman in love. The " beaux," marquisses, 
men of fashion, Sir Harry Wildairs, &c, all 
talk of, and use, and pique themselves on their 
snuff-boxes, without the slightest suspicion 
that there is anything in them to which court- 
ship and elegance can object ; and we suppose 
this is the case still, where the snuff-taker, 
though young in age, is old in habit. Yet we 
should doubt, were we in his place. He cannot 
be certain how many women may have refused 
his addresses on that single account ; nor, if 
he marries, to what secret sources of objection 
it may give rise. To be clean is one of the first 
duties at all times ; to be the reverse, or to 
risk it, in the least avoidable respect, is peril- 
ous in the eyes of that passion, which of all 
others is at once the most lavish and the most 
nice — which makes the greatest allowance for all 
that belongs to it, and the least for whatever is 
cold or foreign, or implies a coarse security. 
A very loving nature, however, may have some 
one unlovely habit, which a wise party on either 
side may correct, if it have any address. The 
only passage which we remember meeting 
with in a book, in which this licence assumed 
by the male sex is touched upon, is in a plea- 
sant comedy translated from the French some 
years ago, and brought upon the stage in 
London — the "Green Man." Mr. Jones, we 
believe, was the translator. He also enacted 
the part of the lover, and very pleasantly he 
did it. It was one of his best performances. 
Luckily for our present purpose, he had a very 
sweet assistant,in the person of Miss Blanchard, 
a young actress of that day, who after charming 
the town with the sprightly delicacy of her 
style, and with a face better than handsome, 
prematurely quitted it, to their great regret, 
though, we believe, for the best of all reasons. 
In the course of her lover's addresses, this 
lady had to find fault with his habit of snuff- 
taking, and she did it with a face full of such 
loving and flattering reasons, and in a voice 
also so truly accordant with the words which 
the author had put into her mouth, that we 
remember thinking how natural it was for the 
gentleman to give up the point as he did, 
instantly, and to pitch the cause of offence 
away from him, with the exclamation, " Ma 
tabatiere, adieu." (Farewell, snuff-box.) Thus 
the French, who were the greatest sinners in 
this matter, appear, as they ought, to have 
been the first reformers of it ; and openly to 
have protested against the union of love and 
snuff-taking, in either sex. 

We merely give this as a hint to certain 
snuff-takers at a particular time of life. We 



52 



A PINCH OF SNUFF. 



are loth to interfere with others, till we can 
find a substitute for the excitement and occu- 
pation which the snuff-box affords, fearing 
that we should steal from some their very- 
powers of reflection ; from some their good- 
temper, or patience, or only consolation ; from 
others their helps to wit and good-fellowship. 
Whenever Gibbon was going to say a good 
thing, it was observed that he announced it by 
a complacent tap on his snuff-box. Life might 
have been a gloomier thing, even than it was, 
to Dr. Johnson, if he had not enlivened his 
views of it with the occasional stimulus of a 
pinch. Napoleon, in his flight from Moscow, 
was observed one day, after pulling a log on to a 
fire, impatiently seeking for his last chance of 
a consoling thought, and he found it in the 
corner of his snuff-box. It was his last pinch ; 
and most imperatively he pinched it ! digging 
it, and fetching it out from its intrenchment. 
Besides, we have a regard for snuff-shops and 
their proprietors, and never pass Pontet's, or 
Killpack's, or Turner's, without wishing well 
to the companionable people that frequent 
them, and thinking of the most agreeable 
periods of English and French wit. You 
might almost as soon divorce the idea of the 
Popes, Steeles, and Voltaires, from their wigs 
and caps, as from their snuff-boxes. Lady 
Mary Wortley took snuff; Madame Du Bocage 
also, no doubt ; we fear even the charming 
Countess of Suffolk, and my lady Harvey. 
Steele in the character of Bickerstaff, speak- 
ing of his half-sister, Miss Jenny Distaff, who 
was a blue-stocking and about to be married, 
thinks it desirable that she should not con- 
tinue to have a nose "all over snuff " in future. 
He seems, in consideration of her books, will- 
ing to compromise with a reasonable beginning. 
Ladies are greatly improved in this respect. 
No blue-stockings now-a-days, we suspect, 
take snuff, that have any pretensions to youth 
or beauty. They rather choose to realise the 
visions of their books, and vindicate the united 
claims of mind and person. Sure of their pre- 
tensions, they even disclaim any pretence, 
except that of wearing stockings like other 
people ; to prove which, like proper unaffected 
women, they give into the fashion of short 
petticoats, philosophically risking the chance 
of drawing inferior eyes from the charms of 
their talk, to those of their feet and ancles. 

In the battle of the Rape of the Lock, Pope 
makes his heroine Belinda conquer one of her 
gallant enemies by chucking a pinch of snuff 
in his face ; nor does he tell us that she bor- 
rowed it. Are we to conclude that even she, 
the pattern of youthful beauty, took it out of 
her own pocket ? 

But this bold lord, with manly strength endued, 
She with one finger and a thumb subdued, 
Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew, 
A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw ; 
The Gnomes direct, to every atom just, 
The pungent grains of titillating dust ; 



[A capital line !] 

Sudden with starting tears each eye o'erflows, 
And the high dome re-echoes to his nose. 

This mode of warfare is now confined to the 
shop-lifters. No modern poet would think of 
making his heroine throw snuff at a man. 

An Italian wit has written a poem on 
Tobacco (La Tabaccheide,) in which, with 
the daring animal spirits of his countrymen, 
he has ventured upon describing a sneeze. We 
shall be bolder than he, considering the less 
enthusiastic noses of the north, and venture to 
give a free version of the passage. 

Ma mi sento tutto~mordere 

E dentro e f uori 

II meato degli odori, 

E la piramide 

Rinocerontica ; 

E via piii crescere 

Quella prurigine, 

Che non mai sazia, 

Va stuzzicandomi, 

Va rimordendomi, 

E inuggiolendomi, 

E va gridandomi 

Fiuta, fiuta, annasa, annasa 

Questa poca, ch'e rimasa — 

Chim'ajuta? su, finiamola, 

Che non e gia questa elleboro, 

Ma divina quintessenza, 

Che da Bacco ha dipendenza, 

Donatrice d' allegri 

D' allegri . . . gri—gri— allegri . . 

(Lo starnuto mel rapia), 

Donatrice d' allegria. 

There is more of it, but we cannot stand sneez- 
ing all night. (We write this towards bed-time.) 

What a moment ! What a doubt ! — 

All my nose, inside and out, 

All my thrilling, tickling, caustic 

Pyramid rhinocerostic, 

Wants to sneeze, and cannot do it ! 

Now it yearns me, thrills me, stings me, 
Now with rapturous torment wrings me, 

Now says " Sneeze, you fool ; get through it. ' 

What shall help me — Oh ! Good heaven ! 

Ah — yes, thank 'ye — Thirty-seven — 

Shee — shee — Oh, tis most &e\-ishi 

Jshi — ishi — most del-ishi 

(Hang it ! I shall sneeze till spring) 

Snuff's a most delicious thing. 

Sneezing, however, is not a high snuff-taking 
evidence. It shows the author to have been 
raw to the science, and to have written more 
like a poet than a professor. 

As snuff-taking is a practice inclining to 
reflection, and therefore to a philosophical 
consideration of the various events of this life, 
grave as well as gay, we shall conclude the 
present article with the only tragical story 
we ever met with in connexion with a snuff- 
box. We found it in a very agreeable book — 
" A Week on the Loire." 

" The younger Cathelineau, devoted with 
hereditary zeal to the worn-out cause of the 
Bourbons, took up arms for Madame la 
Duchesse de Berri ; associated in his suc- 
cesses with M. de Suriac, M. Morriset, and 



WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. 



53 



M. de la Soremere, names dear in the annals 
of fidelity and courage. Orders were given to 
arrest them at Beaupreau ; they took refuge 
in a chateau in the neighbourhood. The 
troops surrounded and searched it, but all in 
vain ; not a single human being was found 
in it. Certain however that the objects of 
their search were actually within the pre- 
cincts of the chateau, they closed the gates, 
set their watch, and allowed no one to enter, 
except a peasant whom they employed to 
show the hiding-places. This watch they 
kept three days, till, wearied by the non- 
appearance of the parties, and the bellowing 
of the cattle, who were confined without water 
and on short allowance, they were on the point 
of quitting the spot ; one of the officers, how- 
ever, thought, previous to doing so, he would 
go over the chateau once more — the peasant 
followed close at his heels : suddenly the officer 
turned towards him, ' Give me a pinch of snuff, 
friend,' said he. 

" ' I have none,' replied the man, * I do not 
take it.' 

" * Then who is there in this chateau that 
does ? ' 

" ' No one that I know of — there is no one in 
the chateau, as you see.' 

" ' Then whence comes the snuff which I 
see here 1 ' said the officer, pointing with his 
foot to some which was scattered on the 
ground. 

" The man turned pale, and made no reply ; 
the officer looked round again, examined the 
earth more closely, stamped with his foot, and 
at last thought he felt a vibration, as if the 
ground below were hollow. He scrutinised 
every inch, and at length saw something like 
a loose board ; he raised it up, and then, alas ! 
he beheld Cathelineau,in front of his three com- 
panions, with his pistols in his hand ready to 
fire. The officer had not a moment to delibe- 
rate, — he fired, — Cathelineau fell dead, and his 
companions were seized. This story was told 
us by the keeper of the Musee, and afterwards 
confirmed by an officer who was one of the 
party employed." 

We almost regret to have closed a light 
article with " so heavy a stone " as this. (" To 
tell him that he shall be annihilated," saith 
Sir Thomas Browne, "is the heaviest stone 
that melancholy can throw at a man.") But 
the snuff-taker, with his magic box in hand, is 
prepared for chances. As the Turk takes to 
his pipe, and the sailor to his roll of tobacco, 
so he to his pinch ; and he is then prepared 
for whatsoever comes, — for a melancholy face 
with the melancholy, or a laugh with the 

gay- 

Ai) other pinch, reader, before we part. 



XXIV.— WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. 

" It is allowed on all hands, now, that there 
are no sonnets in any language comparable 
with Wordsworth's. Even Milton must yield 
the palm. He has written but about a dozen or 
so, Wordsworth some hundreds — and though 
nothing can surpass ' the inspired grandeur of 
that on the Piedmontese Massacre, the tender- 
ness of those on his Blindness and on his 
Deceased Wife, the grave dignity of that to a 
Young Lady, or the cheerful and Attic grace 
of those to Lawrence and Cyriac Skinner,' as 
is finely said by the writer of an article in the 
'Edinburgh Review' on Glassford's 'Lyrical 
Translations,' yet many of Wordsworth's equal 
even these — and the long and splendid array 
of his sonnets — deploying before us in series 
after series — astonishes us by the proof it 
affords of the inexhaustible riches of his ima- 
ginative genius and his moral wisdom. One 
series on the river Duddon — two series dedi- 
cated to Liberty — three series on our Eccle- 
siastical History — miscellaneous sonnets in 
multitudes — and those last poured forth as 
clear, and bright, and strong, as the first that 
issued from the sacred spring ! " — Blackwood's 
Magazine. 

Most true is this. Wordsworth's untired 
exuberance is indeed astonishing ; though it 
becomes a little less so, when we consider that 
his genius has been fortunate in a long life of 
leisure, his opinions not having rendered it 
necessary to him to fight with difficulties, and 
daily cares, and hostile ascendancies, as Mil- 
ton's did, 
" Exposed to daily fraud, contempt, and wrong, 

With darkness and with dangers compass'd round." 

In that condition sate the great blind epic 
poet; and after having performed an active 
as well as contemplative part for his earthly 
sojourn, still combined action with contempla- 
tion in a mighty narrative, and built the ada- 
mantine gates of another world. In no in- 
vidious regard for one great poet against 
another do we say it ; but in justice to fame 
itself, and in the sincerest reverence of ad- 
miration for both. With the exception of 
Shakspeare (who included everybody), Words- 
worth has proved himself the greatest con- 
templative poet this country has produced. 
His facility is wonderful. He never wants 
the fittest words for the finest thoughts. He can 
express, at will, those innumerable shades of 
feeling which most other writers, not unworthy 
too, in their degree, of the name of poets, 
either dismiss at once as inexpressible, or find 
so difficult of embodiment, as to be content 
with shaping them forth but seldom, and re- 
posing from their labours. And rhyme, instead 
of a hindrance, appears to be a positive help. 
It serves to concentrate his thoughts and make 
them closer and more precious. Milton did 



54 



WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. 



not pour forth sonnets in this manner — poems 
in hundreds of little channels, — all solid and 
fluent gold. No ; but he was venting himself, 
instead, in "Paradise Lost." "Paradise Lost," 
if the two poets are to he compared, is the 
set-off against Wordsworth's achievement in 
sonnet- writing. There is the " Excursion," to 
be sure ; but the " Excursion " is made up of 
the same purely contemplative matter. It is 
a long-drawn song of the nightingale ; as the 
sonnets are its briefer warbles. There is no 
eagle-flight in the " Excursion ;" no sustain- 
ment of a mighty action ; no enormous hero, 
bearing on his wings the weight of a lost eter- 
nity, and holding on, nevertheless, undismayed, 
— firm-visaged through faltering chaos, — the 
combatant of all chance and all power, — a 
vision that, if he could be seen now, would be 
seen in the sky like a comet, remaining, though 
speeding, — visible for long nights, though ra- 
pidly voyaging, — a sight for a universe, — an 
actor on the stage of infinity. There is no such 
robust and majestic work as this in Wordsworth. 
Compared with Milton he is but as a dreamer 
on the grass, though a divine one ; and worthy 
to be compared as a younger, a more fluent- 
speeched, but less potent brother, whose busi- 
ness it is to talk and think, and gather together 
his flocks of sonnets like sheep (beauteous as 
clouds iu heaven), while the other is abroad, 
more actively moving in the world, with con- 
templations that take the shape of events. 
There are many points of resemblance between 
Wordsworth and Milton. They are both serious 
men ; both in earnest ; both maintainers of 
the dignity of poetry in life and doctrine ; and 
both are liable to some objections on the 
score of sectarianism, and narrow theological 
views. But Milton widened these as he grew 
old ; and Wordsworth, assisted by the advanc- 
ing light of the times, (for the greatest minds 
are seldom as great as the whole instinctive 
mind of society,) cannot help conceding or 
qualifying certain views of his own, though 
timidly, and with fear of a certain few, such 
as Milton never feared. Milton, however, was 
never weak in his creed, whatever it was ; he 
forced it into width enough to embrace all 
place and time, future as well as present. 
Wordsworth would fain dwindle down the 
possibilities of heaven and earth within the 
views of a Church-of-England establishment. 
And he is almost entirely a retrospective poet. 
The vast future frightens him, and he would 
fain believe that it is to exist only in a past 
shape, and that shape something very like one 
of the smallest of the present, with a vestry 
for the golden church of the New Jerusalem, 
and beadles for the " limitary cherubs." Now 
we hope and believe, that the very best of the 
past will merge into the future, — how long 
before it be superseded by a still better, we 
cannot say. And we own that we can conceive 
of nothing better than some things which 



already exist, in venerable as well as lovely 
shapes. But how shall we pretend to limit 
the vast flood of coming events, or have such 
little faith in nature, providence, and the en- 
lightened co-operation of humanity, as to sup- 
pose that it will not adjust itself in the noblest 
and best manner ? In this respect, and in some 
others, Mr. Wordsworth's poetry wants uni- 
versality. He calls upon us to sympathise with 
his churches and his country flowers, and his 
blisses of solitude ; and he calls well ; but he 
wants one of the best parts of persuasion ; he 
is not reciprocal ; he does not sufficiently sym- 
pathise with our towns and our blisses of society, 
and our reformations of churches (the conse- 
quences, after all, of his own. What would he 
not have said, by the by, in behalf of popery, 
had he lived before a Reformation !) And it may 
may be said of him, as Johnson said of Milton's 
"Allegro" and " Pensieroso," that "no mirth 
indeed can be found in his melancholy," but it 
is to be feared there is always "some melancholy 
in his mirth." His muse invites us to the trea- 
sures of his retirement in beautiful, noble, and 
inexhaustible language ; but she does it, after 
all, rather like a teacher than a persuader, and 
fails in impressing upon us the last and best ar- 
gument,that she herself is happy. Happy she 
must be, it is true, in many senses ; for she is 
happy in the sense of power, happy in the sense 
of a good intention, happy in fame, in words, in 
the consciousness of immortal poetry; yet there 
she is, after all, not quite persuasive, — more 
rich in the means than in the ends, — with 
something of a puritan austerity upon her, — 
more stately than satisfactory, — wanting in 
animal spirits, in perfect and hearty sympathy 
with our pleasures, and her own. A vaporous 
melancholy hangs over his most beautiful land- 
scapes. He seems always girding himself up for 
his pilgrimage of joy,ratherthanenjoyingit; and 
his announcements are in a tone too exemplary 
and didactic. We admire him ; we venerate 
him ; we would fain agree with him : but 
we feel something wanting on his own part 
towards the largeness and healthiness of other 
men's wider experience ; and we resent, for 
his sake as well as ours, that he should insist 
upon squaring all which is to come in the in- 
terminable future, with the visions that bound 
a college cap. We feel that it will hurt the 
effect of his genius with posterity, and make 
the most admiring of his readers, in the third 
and fourth generation, lament over his narrow- 
ness. In short, his poetry is the sunset to the 
English church, — beautiful as the real sunset 
"with evening beam," gorgeous, melancholy, 
retrospective, giving a new and divine light to 
the lowliest flowers, and setting the pinnacles 
of the churches golden in the heavens. Yet 
nothing but a sunset and a retrospection it 
is. A new and great day is coming, — diviner 
still, we believe, — larger, more universal, more 
equable, showing (manifestly) the heavens more 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



55 



just, and making mankind more truly religious, 
because more cheerful and grateful. 

The editor of "Blackwood" justly prides 
himself on having appreciated this noble poet 
from the first ; but it is a pity, we think, that 
he looks back in anger upon those whose 
literary educations were less fortunate ; — who 
had been brought up in schools of a different 
taste, and who showed, after all, a natural 
strength of taste singularly honourable to 
them, in being able to appreciate real poetry 
at last, even in quarters to which the editor 
himself, we believe, has never yet done justice, 
though no man could do it better. For Wilson's 
prose (and we could not express our admira- 
tion of it more highly) might stretch forth its 
thick and rich territory by the side of Keats's 
poetry, like a land of congenial exuberance, — 
a forest tempest-tost indeed, compared with 
those still valleys and enchanted gardens, but 
set in the same identical region of the remote, 
the luxuriant, the mythological, — governed by 
a more wilful and scornful spirit, but such as 
hates only from an inverted principle of the 
loving, impatient of want of sympathy, and 
incapable, in the last resort, of denying the 
beautiful wheresoever existing,because thereby 
it would deny the divine part of itself. Why 
should Christopher North revert to the errors 
of his critical brethren in past times, seeing 
that they are all now agreed, and that every 
one of them perhaps has something to forgive 
himself in his old judgments (ourselves as- 
suredly not excepted, — if we may be allowed 
to name ourselves among them)? Men got 
angry from political differences, and were not 
in a temper to give dispassionate poetical judg- 
ments. And yet Wordsworth had some of his 
greatest praises from his severest political 
opponents (Hazlitt, for instance); and out of 
the former Scotch school of criticism, which 
was a French one, or that of Pope and Boileau, 
came the first hearty acknowledgment of the 
merits of Keats, for whom we were delighted the 
other day to find that an enthusiastic admiration 
is retained by the chief of that school (Jeffrey), 
whose natural taste has long had the rare 
honour of triumphing over his educational one, 
and who ought, we think, now that he is a 
Lord of Session, to follow, at his leisure mo- 
ments, the example set him by the most ac- 
complished of all national benches of judicature, 
and give us a book that should beat, never- 
theless, all the Kameses and Woodhouselees 
before him ; as it assuredly would. 



XXV.— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. No. I. 

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London, 
in the year 1 328, apparently of a gentleman's 
family, and was bred in the court of Edward 
the Third. He married a sister of Catherine 
Swynford, mistress, and afterwards wife, to 



the King's son, John of Gaunt ; and was 
employed in court offices, and in a mission to 
Italy, where he is supposed to have had an 
interview with Petrarch. In the subsequent 
reign he fell into trouble, owing to his con- 
nexion with John of Gaunt's party and the 
religious reformers of those days ; upon which 
he fled to the Continent, but returned ; and, 
after an imprisonment of three years, was set 
at liberty, on condition of giving up the designs 
of his associates ; — a blot on the memory of 
this great poet, and apparently, otherwise 
amiable and excellent man, which he has 
excused as well as he could, by alleging that 
they treated him ill, and would have plundered 
and starved him. He died in the year 1400, and 
was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to 
which he had had a house on the site where 
Henry the Seventh's chapel now stands : so 
that the reader, in going along the pavement 
there, is walking where Chaucer once lived. 

His person, in advanced life, tended to cor- 
pulency ; and he had a habit of looking down. 
In conversation he was modest, and of few 
words. He was so fond of reading, that he 
says he took heed of nothing in comparison, 
and would sit at his books till he dimmed 
his eyes. The only thing that took him from 
them was a walk in the fields. 

Chaucer (with Spenser, Shakspeare, and 
Milton) is one of the Four Great English 
Poets ; and it is with double justice that he 
is called the Father of English Poetry, for, as 
Dante did with Italian, he helped to form its 
very language. Nay, it burst into luxuriance 
in his hands, like a sudden month of May. 
Instead of giving you the idea of an " old " 
poet, in the sense which the word vulgarly 
acquires, there is no one, upon acquaintance, 
who seems so young, consistently with maturity 
of mind. His poetry rises in the land like a 
clear morning, in which you see everything 
with a rare and crystal distinctness, from the 
mountain to the minutest flower, — towns, soli- 
tudes, human beings, — open doors, showing 
you the interior of cottages and of palaces, — 
fancies in the clouds, fairy-rings in the grass; 
and in the midst of all sits the mild poet, alone, 
his eyes on the ground, yet with his heart full 
of everything round him, beating, perhaps, 
with the bosoms of a whole city, whose multi- 
tudes are sharing his thoughts with the daisy. 
His nature is the greatest poet's nature, omit- 
ting nothing in its sympathy (in which respect 
he is nearer to Shakspeare than either of their 
two illustrious brethren) ; and he combines an 
epic power of grand, comprehensive, and pri- 
mitive imagery, with that of being contented 
with the smallest matter of fact near him, and 
of luxuriating in pure vague animal spirits, 
like a dozer in a field. His gaiety is equal to 
his gravity, and his sincerity to both. You 
could as little think of doubting his word, as 
i the point of the pen that wrote it. It cuts as 



5b" 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



clear and sharp into you, as the pen on the 
paper. His belief in the good and beautiful is 
childlike ; as Shakspeare's is that of everlasting 
and manly youth. Spenser's and Milton's are 
more scholarly and formal. Chaucer excels in 
pathos, in humour, in satire, character, and 
description. His graphic faculty, and healthy 
sense of the material, strongly ally him to the 
painter ; and perhaps a better idea could not 
be given of his universality than by saying, 
that he was at once the Italian and the Flemish 
painter of his time, and exhibited the pure 
expression of Raphael, the devotional intensity 
of Domenechino, the colour and corporeal fire 
of Titian, the manners of Hogarth, and the 
homely domesticities of Ostade and Teniers ! 
His faults are, coarseness, which was that of 
his age,— and in some of his poems, tedious- 
ness, which is to be attributed to the same 
cause, — a book being a book in those days, 
written by few, and when it was written, 
tempting the author to cram into it everything 
that he had learned, in default of there being 
any encyclopaedias. That tediousness was no 
innate fault of the poet's, is strikingly manifest, 
not only from the nature of his genius, but 
from the fact of his throwing it aside as he 
grew older and more confident, and spoke in 
his own person. The " Canterbury Tales," 
his last and greatest work, is almost entirely 
free from it, except where he gives us a long 
prose discourse, after the fashion of the day ; 
and in no respect is his " Palamon and Arcite " 
more remarkable, than in the exquisite judg- 
ment with which he has omitted everything 
superfluous in his prolix original, " The 
Teseide," — the work of the great and poetical- 
natured, but not great poet, Boccaccio ; — (for 
Boccaccio's heart and nature were poems ; but 
he could not develop them well in verse.) 

In proceeding to give specimens from the 
works of the father of our verse, the abund- 
ance which lies before us is perplexing, and, in 
order to do anything like justice, we are con- 
strained to be unjust to his context, and to 
be more piecemeal than is desirable. Our 
extracts are from the volumes lately given to 
the world by Mr. Clarke, entitled the " Riches 
of Chaucer," in which the spelling is modernised, 
and the old pronunciation marked with accents, 
so as to show the smoothness of the versifica- 
tion. That Chaucer is not only a smooth, but 
a powerful and various versifier, is among the 
wonders of his advance beyond his age ; but 
it is still doubtful, whether his prosody was 
always correct in the modern sense, — that is to 
say, whether all his lines contain the regulated 
number of syllables, or whether he does not 
sometimes make time stand for number ; or, 
in other words, a strong and hearty emphasis 
on one syllable perform the part of two, — as 
in the verse which will be met with below, 
about the monk on horseback ; of whom he 
says, that 



" Men might his bridle hear 
Ginglmg in a whistling wind as clear, 
And eke as loud as doth the chapel bell." 

SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER'S PORTRAIT-PAINTING 
AND HUMOUR. 

(From the set of Characters at the beginning of the Canter- 
bury Tales.) 

THE KNIGHT. 

And evermore he had a sovereign prise, 

And though that he was worthy he was wise, 

And of his port as meek as is a maid. 

He never yet no villainy ne said, 

In all his life unto no manner wight : 

He was a very perfect gentle knight. 

* * * * 

THE SQUIRE. 

With him there was his son, a younge Squier, 
A lover and a lusty bacheler, 
With locked curl'd as they were laid in press ; 
Of twenty years of age he was I guess, 
Of his stature he was of even length, 
And wonderly deliver i, and great of strength ; 
And he had been some time in chevachie 2 , 
In Flaunders, in Artois, and Picardie, 
And borne him well, as of so little space, 
In hope to standen in his lady's grace. 

Embroidered was he, as it were a mead 
All full of freshe flowres, white and red : 
Singing he was or floyting 3 all the day ; 
He was as fresh as is the month of May : 

* * * * 

Courteous he was, lowly and serviceable, 
And carved before his father at the table. 

[Which was the custom for sons in those days. 
His attendant yeoman is painted in a line.] 

THE YEOMAN. 

A nut-head had he with a brown visage. 

THE PRIORESS. 

There was also a Nun, a Prioress ; 
That of her smiling was full simple and coy, 
Her greatest oath n'as but by " Saint Eloy," 
And she was cleped Madam Eglantine ; 
Full well she sange the service divine, 
Entuned in her nose full sweetely ; 
And French she spake full fair and fetisly, 
After the school of Stratford atti Bow, 
For French of Paris was to her unknow: 

[A touch of good satire that might tell now !] 

At meate she was well ytaught withal, 
She let no morsel from her lippes fall, 
Ne wet her fingers in her sauce deep ; 
Well could she carry a morsel, and well keep. 

[These are the elegancies which it was thought 
necessary to teach in that age.] 

But for to speaken of her conscience ; 
She was so charitable and so piteous, 
She woulde weep if that she saw a mouse 
Caught in a trap, if it were dead or bled. 
Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed 
With roasted flesh, and milk, and wastel bread, 
But sore wept she if one of them were dead, 
Or if men smote it with a yarde smart : 
And all was conscience and tender heart. 

[What a charming verse is that !] 

i Agile. 
2 Chevauchee (French)— military service on horseback. 
3 Fluting. 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



57 



THE MONK. 

A Monk there was, a fair for the mast'ry, 
An out-rider, that loved venery • ; 
A manly man to been an abbot able ,- 
Full many a dainty horse had he in stable, 
And when he rode men might his bridle hear 
Gingling in a whistling wind as clear, 
And eke as loud, as doth the chapel bell, 
There as this lord was keeper of the cell. 

The rule' of Saint Maure and of Saint Bene't, 
Because that it was old, and somedeal strait, 
This ilke monk let olde thinges pace, 
And held after the newe world the trace. 
He gave not of the text a pulled hen, 
That saith, that hunters be not holy men, 
Nor that a monk when he is reckeiess, 
Is like to a fish that is waterless ; 
This is to say, a monk out of his cloister ; 
This ilke text held he not worth an oyster. 
* * * * 

His head was bald, and shone as any glass, 
And eke his face, as it had been anoint ; 
He was a lord full fat and in good point ; 
His eyen steep, and rolling in his head, 
That steamed as a furnace of a lead ; 
His bootes supple, his horse in great estate ; 
Now certainly he was a fair prelate : 

TOf the sly and accommodating Friar we are 
told, that] 

Full sweetdly heard he confession, 
And pleasant was his absolutidn. 

This was a couplet that used to delight the 
late Mr. Hazlitt. To give it its full gusto, it 
! should be read with a syllabical precision, after 
the fashion of Dominie Sampson. 

THE SCHOLAR. 

Him was lever 2 have at his bed's head 

Twenty bookes, clothed in black or red, 

Of Aristotle and his philosophy, 

Than robe's rich, or fiddle or psaltry, 

But all be that he was a philosopher 

Yet hadde he but little gold in coffer, 

But all that he might of his friended hent, 

On bookes and on learning he it spent, 

And busily 'ganfor the soules pray 

Of them that gave him wherewith to scholay. 

Of study took he moste cure and heed ; 

Not a word spake he more than was need ; 

And that was said in form and reverence, 

And short and quick, and full of high sentence : 

Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, 

And gladly would he learn and gladly teach. 

A noble verse, containing all the zeal and 
single-heartedness of a true love of knowledge. 
The account of 



THE SERGEANT OF THE LAW 

contains a couplet, which will do for time 
everlasting to describe a bustling man of 
business. If Fielding had read Chaucer, he 
would assuredly have applied it to his Lawyer 
Dowling, who " wished he could cut himself 
into twenty pieces," he had so much to do. 

No where so busy a man as he there n'as 3 , 
And yet he seemed busier than he was. 



Venery — Hunting. 
3 Pronounced noz. 



2 Rather, 
was not. 



THE SAILOR. 

A Shipman was there, woned far by west ; 
For aught I wot, he was of Dartemouth : 
He rode upon a rouncy as he couth, 

[He rode upon a hack-horse as well as he 
could.] 

All in a gown of falding to the knee. 

A dagger hanging by a lace had he 

About his neck under his arm adown : 

The hote summer had made his hue all brown : 

And certainly he was a good fellaw ; 

Full many a draught of wine he hadde^ draw 

From Bourdeaux ward, while that the chapmen 

Of nice conscience took he no keep. [sleep : 

If that he fought and had the higher hand, 

By water he sent them home to every land. 

But of his craft to reckon well his tides, 

His streames and his strandes him besides ; 

His harberow, his moon, and his lodemanage, 

There was none such from Hull unto Carthage. 

Hardy he was, and wise, I undertake ; 

With many a tempest had his beard been shake : 

He knew well all the havens, as they were 

From Gothland to the Cape de Finistere ; 

And every creek in Bretagne and in Spain ; 

His barge ycleped was the Magdalen. 

THE PARISH PRIEST. 

Wide was his parish, and houses far asunder, 
But he ne left naught, for no rain nor thunder, 
In sickness and in mischief, to visit 
The farthest in his parish much and lite. 
* * * * 

He sette' not his benefice to hire, 
And let his sheep accumbred in the mire, 
And ran unto London, unto Saint Poule's 
To seeken him a chantery of souls, 
Or with a brotherhood to be withold ; 
But dwelt at home and kept£ well his fold, 
So that the wolf he made it not miscarry ; 
He icas a shepherd and no mercenary ; 

* * * * 

He waited after no pomp or reverence, 
Ne maked him no spiced conscience, 
But Christes love, and his apostles twelve 
He taught, but first he followed it himself. 

How admirably well expressed is spiced con- 
science — a conscience requiring to be kept easy 
and sweet with drugs and luxurious living. 



XXVI.— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 

NO. II. 

Several of Chaucer's best poems are trans- 
lations from the Italian and French, but of so 
exquisite a kind, so improved in character, so 
enlivened with fresh natural touches and freed 
from comparative superfluity (in some instances, 
freed from all superfluity) that they justly take 
the rank of originals. We are sorry that we 
have not the poem of Boccaccio by us, from 
which he took the " Knight's Tale," containing 
the passages that follow, — in order that we 
might prove this to the reader ; but it is lucky 
perhaps in other respects, for it would have 
led us beyond our limits ; and all that we pro- 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



fess in these extracts, is to give just so many- 
passages of an author as shall suffice for evi- 
dence of his various characteristics. We take, 
from his garden, specimens of the flowers for 
which he is eminent, and send them before 
the public as in a horticultural show. To see 
them in their due juxtaposition and abundance, 
we must refer to the gardens themselves ; to 
which it is of course one of our objects to tempt 
the beholder. 

PHYSICAL LIFE AND MOVEMENT. 

A young knight going a-Maying. 
Compare the saliency, and freshness, and 
natural language of the following description 
of Arcite going a-Maying, with the more arti- 
ficial version of the passage in Dryden. Sir 
Walter Scott says of it, that the modern poet 
must yield to the ancient, in spite of " the 
beauty of his versification." But with all due 
respect to Sir Walter, here is the versification 
itself, as superior in its impulsive melody, even 
to Dryden's, as a thoroughly unaffected beauty 
is to a beauty half spoilt. 

The busy lark, the messenger of day, 
Salueth ' in her song the morrow grey, 
And fiery Phoebus riseth up so bright, 
That all the orient laugheth of the sight, 
And with his streamer drieth in the grevcs - 
The silver droppes hanging on the leaves : 
And Arcite, that is in the court real 3 
With Theseus, the squier principal, 
Is risen, and looketh on the merry day ; 
And for to do his observance to May, 
Remembring on the point of his desire, 
He on his courser, starting as the fire, 

[An admirable image ! He means those sud- 
den catches and impulses of a fiery horse, 
analogous to the shifting starts of a flame in 
action ;] 

Is ridden to the fieldes, him to play, 
Out of the court, were it a mile or tway ; 

[These are the mixtures of the particular with 
the general, by which natural poets come home 
to us ;] 

And to the grove of which that I you told, 
By a venture * his way he gan to hold, 
To maken him a garland of the greves, 
Were it of woodbind, or of hawthorn leaves, 
And loud he sang against the sunny sheen ; 5 
May, — with all thy flowr^s and thy green, 
Right welcome be thou, faire freshe May : 
I hope that I some green here getten may. 

[" I hope that I may get some green here :" — 
an expression a little more off-hand and 
trusting, and fit for the season, than the con- 
ventional common-places of the passage in 
Dryden — 

"For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries 
wear ! !" &c] 



i Saluteth. 



groves. 



RoyaL 



Per aventura (Italian)— by chance. 
5 The sunshine. 



PORTRAITS OF TWO WARRIOR KINGS. 

There mayst thou see, coming with Palamon, 
Licurge himself, the greate king of Thrace, 
Black was his beard, and manly ivas his face,- 

[Here was Dryden's and Pope's turn of line 
anticipated under its most popular form.] 

The circles of his eyen in his head 
They gloweden betwixen yellow and red, 
And like a griffon looked he about, 
With combed haires on his browes stout ; 

[That is to say, a forehead of the simplest, 
potent appearance, with no pains taken to set 
it out.] 

His limbes great, his brawnes hard and strong, 

His shoulders broad; his armes round and long ; 

And as the guise was in his countree, 

Full high upon a car of gold stood he. 

With foure white bulles in the trace 

Instead of coat armour on his harnace, 6 

With nailes yellow, and bright as any gold, 

He had a beare's skin, cole-black for old. 

His longe hair was comb'd behind his back 

As any raven's feather it shone for black ; 

A wreath of gold arm-great, of huge weight, 

Upon his head sate full of stones bright, 

Of fine rubies and of diamonds. 

About his car there wenten white alauns 7 

Twenty and more, as great as any steer, 

To bun ten at the lion or the deer, 

And followed him, with muzzle fast ybound, 

Collar'd with gold, and tourettes 8 filed round. 

A hundred lordes had he in his rout 

Armed full well with heartes stern and stout. 

With Arcita, in stories as men find. 

The great Emetrius, the King of Ind, 

Upon a steede bay, trapped in steel, 

Cover'd with cloth of gold diapred wele, 

Came riding like the god of armes, Mars ; 

[There's a noble line, with the monosyllable 
for a climax !] 

His coat-armour was of a cloth of Tars ; 

Couched 9 with pearles white and round and great ; 

****** 

His crispe hair like ringes was y-run, 

And that was yellow, and glittered as the sun ; 

His nose was high, his eyen a bright citrine, 10 

His lippes round, his colour was sanguine ; 

A few frackness ll in his face ysprent, ,2 

Betwixen yellow and black somdeal yment ; 13 

And as a lion he his looking cast. 

[He does not omit the general impression, not- 
withstanding all these particulars. You may 
see his portrait close or at a distance, as you 
please.] 

Of five-and-twenty years his age I cast 14 ; 
His beard was well beginning for to spring ; 
His voice was as a tritmpe" thundering. 
***** 

6 Harness. ' Alano, (Spanish,) a species of hound. 

8 Rings on the collars to leash by. 9 Imbedded. 

10 Citron-colour. It seems to imply what has been some- 
times called a green-eye — a hazel dashed with a sort of 
sparkling yellow. i l Freckles. 

iz Sprinkled. 13 Mingled. 

14 Reckon.— Chaucer, like the Italians and French, used 
the same word for a rhyme, provided the meaning was 
different. 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



59 



A hundred lordes had he with him there, 
All armed save their heads, in all their gear; 
Full richely in alle manner thinges ; 
For trusteth well *, that earles, dukes, kinges, 
Were gather'd in this noble company, 
For love, and for increase of chivalry. 
About this king there ran on every part, 
Full many a tame lion and leopart. 



XXVII.— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 

NO. III. — HIS PATHOS. 

Chaucer's pathos is true nature's : it goes 
directly to its object. His sympathy is not 
fashion'd and clipped by modes and respects ; 
and herein, indeed, he was lucky in the com- 
paratively homely breeding of his age, and in 
the dearth of books. His feelings were not 
rendered critical and timid. Observe the 
second line, for instance, of the following 
verses. The glossaries tell us that the word 
" swelt " means fainted — died. There may be a 
Saxon word with such a meaning — but luckily 
for nature and Chaucer, there is another Saxon 
word, swell, of which sweWd is the past tense, 
and most assuredly this is the word here ; as 
the reader will feel instantly. No man, how- 
ever much in love, faints " full oft a day ;" but 
he may swell, as the poet says, — that is to say, 
heave his bosom and body with the venting of 
his long suspended breath, and say, Alas ! 
The fainting is unnatural ; the sigh and the 
heaving is most natural, and most admirably 
expressed by this homely word. We have 
therefore spelt it accordingly, to suit the rest 
of the orthography. 

THE UNHAPPY LOVER. 

{From the Knight's Tale.) 
When that Arcite to Thebes comen was, 
Full oft a day he swell'd, and said, Alas! 
For see his lady shall he never mo. 3 
And shortly to concluden all his woe. 
So muckle sorrow had never creature 
That is, or shall be, while the world may dure : 
His sleep, his meat, his drink is him beraft, 
That lean he wax'd, and dry as is a shaft, — 
His eyen hollow, and grisly to behold, 
His hue sallow, and pale as ashes cold ; 
And solitary he was and ever alone, 
And wailing all the night, making his moan ; 
And if he hear ds song or instrument, 
Then would he wecpe ,- he mighte not be stent. 

That is, could not be stopped ; the wilful, 
washing, self-pitying tears would flow. This 
touch about the music is exquisite. 

Dryden, writing for the court of Charles the 
Second, does not dare to let Arcite weep, when 
he hears music. He restricts him to a gentle- 
manly sigh — 

He sighs when songs or instruments he hears. 

1 Believe me. The third person singular, had the force, 
in those days, of the imperative. 

2 More. " Mo " is 6till to be found in the old version of 
the Psalms. 



The cold ashes, which have lost their fire (we 
have the phrase still " as pale as ashes ") he 
turns to " sapless boxen leaves," (a classical 
simile) ; and far be it from him to venture to 
say a swell." No gentleman ever " swell'd ; " 
certainly not with sighing, whatever he might 
have done with drinking. But instead of that, 
the modern poet does not mind indulging him 
with a good canting common-place, in the 
style of the fustian tragedies. 

He raved with all the madness of despair : 
He raved, he beat his breast, he tore his hair. 

And then we must have a solid sensible reason 
for the lover's not weeping : 

Dry sorrow in his stupid eyes appears, 

For wanting nourishment, he wanted tears.' 

It was not sufficient, that upon the principle of 
extremes meeting, the excess of sorrow was 
unable to weep, — that even self-pity seemed 
wasted. When the fine gentlemen of the 
court of Charles the Second, and when Charles 
himself, wept (see Pepys), it was when they 
grew maudlin over their wine, and thought 
how piteous it was that such good eaters and 
drinkers should not have everything else to 
their liking. But let us not run the risk of 
forgetting the merits of Dryden, in comparing 
him with a poet so much the greater. 

THE SAME LOVER DYING. 

Alas the woe ! alas the paines strong 
That I for you have suffer'd, and so long ! 
Alas the death ! alas mine Emily ! 
Alas, departing of our company ! 
Alas mine heartes queen ! Alas my wife ! 

" Alas," it is to be observed, was the common 
expression of grief in those days ; and all these 
repetitions of it only show the loud, wilful self- 
commiseration, natural to dying people of a 
violent turn of mind, as this lover was. But 
he was also truly in love, and a gentleman. 
See how he continues : 

Mine heartes lady, ender of my life ! 
What is this world ? What ashen men to have 9 
Now with his love, now in his cold grave : 
Alone, — withouten any company. 

How admirably expressed the difference 
between warm social life, and the cold solitary 
grave ! How piteous the tautology — " Alone — 
withouten any company !" 

Farewell, my sweet ; — farewell, mine Emily. 
And soft — take me in your armes tway 
For love of God, and hearken what I say. 

He has had an unjust quarrel with his rival 
and once beloved friend, Palamon : — 

I have here with my cousin Palamon, 
Had strife and rancour many a day agone, 
For love of you, and for my jealousy ; 
And Jupiter so wis my soule gie, 3 
To speken of a servant 4 properly 
With alle circumstances truely, 

3 So surely guide my soul. ? A lady's servant or lover. 



GO 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



That is to say, truth, honour, and knigthead, 

Wisdom, humbless, estate, and high kindred, 

Freedom, and all that longeth to that art, l 

So Jupiter have of my soule part, 

As in this world right now ne know I none 

So worthy to be loved as Palamon, 

That serveth you, and will do all his life ; 

And if that ever ye shall be a wife, 

Forget not Palamon, the gentle man. 

SIMILE OF A MAN LED TO EXECUTION. 

(From the "Man of Law's Tale.") 

The virtuous Constance, wrongfully accused, 
stands pale, and looking about her, among a 
king's courtiers. 

Have ye not seen, sometime, a pale face 
(Among a press) 2 of him that hath been led 
Toward his death, where as he getteth no grace 
And such a colour in his face hath had, 
They mighten know him that was so bested 
Amongest all the faces in that rout ; 
So stant Custance, and looketh her about. 

THE MOTHER AND CHILD PUT TO THE MERCY OF THE 
OCEAN. 

! The same Constance, accused by the king's 
mother of having produced him a monstrous 
child, is treated as above, against the will of 
the Constable of the realm, who is forced to 
obey his master's orders. 

Weepen both young and old, in all that place, 

When that the king this cursed letter sent, 

And Custance, with a deadly paleface 

The fourth day toward the ship she went : 

But nathtless she tak'th in good intent 

The will of Christ, and kneeling on the strond 

She said, " Lord, aye welcome be thy sond. 3 

He that me kepU from the falsi! blame 

Whiles I was in the land amongds you, 

He can me keep from harm, and eke from shame, 

In the salt sea, although I see not how. 

As strong as ever he teas, he is yet now. 

In him trust I, and in his mother dear 

That is to me my sail, and eke my steer. 

Her little child lay weeping in her arm : 

And kneeling piteously, to him she said, 

" Peac?, little son, I will do thee no harm ." 

With that her kerchief off her head she braid, 

And over his little eyen she it laid, 

And in her arm she lullelh it full fast, 

And into the heav'n her eyen up she cast. 

Mother (quoth she) and maiden bright, Mary ! 

Sooth is, that thorough womannes eggment * 

Mankind was born, and damned aye to die, 

For which thy child was on a cross yrent : 5 

Thy blissful eyen saw all his tormint ,- 

Then is there no comparison between 

Thy woe and any woe man may sustain. 

The true piteous emphasis on the words of this 
line is not to be surpassed. 

Thou saw'st thy child yslain before thine eyen, 
And yet now liveth my little child parfay. 6 
Now, Lady bright ! to whom all woeful crien, 
Thou glory of womanhood, thou faire May ! 
Thou haven of refuge, bright star of day, 
Rue on my child, that of thy gentleness 
Ruest on every rueful in distress. 

1 The art of truly serving. a In a multitude. 

3 Thy sending — the lot thou sendest. 
4 Incitement. 5 Torn. 

e By my faith. 



O little child, alas ! what is thy guilt, 
That never wroughtest sin as yet, pardie? 
Why will thine hard father have thee spilt ? 
O mercy, deare Constable (quoth she) 
As let my little child dwell here with thee. 

The silence of the pitying constable, here 
hurriedly passed over by poor Constance, as if 
she would not distress him by pressing him for 
what he could not do, is a specimen of those 
eloquent poioers of omission, for which great 
masters in writing are famous. Constance 
immediately continues : — 

An' if thou darest not saven him from blame, 
So kiss him one's 1 in his father's name. 
Therewith she looketh backward to the land 
And saide, " Farewell, husband ruthe'less ■'" 
And up she rose, and walked down the strand 
Toward the ship : her followeth all the press : 
And ever sheprayeth her child to hold his peace, 
And tak'th her leave. 

The mixture of natural kindliness, bewildered 
feeling, and indelible good-breeding in this 
perpetual leave-taking, is excessively affecting. 

And with a holy intent 
She blesseth her, and into the ship she went. 

Glorious, sainted Griselda in our next. 



XXVIII— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 

NO. IV. — STORY OF GRISELDA. 

The famous story of Griselda, or Patient 
Grizel, who supposes her husband to kill her 
children and to dismiss her finally from his bed 
under circumstances of the greatest outrage, 
and yet behaves meekly under all, was not long 
since the most popular story in Europe, and 
still deeply affects us. Writers have asserted 
that there actually was some such person. In 
vain has the husband been pronounced a mon- 
ster, and the story impossible. In vain have 
critics in subsequent time, not giving sufficient 
heed to the difference between civilised and 
feudal ages, or to the beauties with which the 
narrative has been mingled, declared it to be 
no better than the sight of a " torment on the 
rack." The story has had shoals of narrators, 
particularly in old France, and been repeated 
and dwelt upon by the greatest and tenderest 
geniuses, — Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer. 
The whole heart of Christendom has embraced 
the heroine. She has passed into a proverb ; 
ladies of quality have called their children 
after her, the name surviving (we believe) 
among them to this day, in spite of its griesly 
sound ; and we defy the manliest man, of any 
feeling, to read it in Chaucer's own consecutive 
stanzas (whatever he may do here) without 
feeling his eyes moisten. 

How is this to be accounted for ? The hus- 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



61 



band is perfectly monstrous and unnatural ; — 
there can be no doubt of that ; — he pursues his 
trial of his wife's patience for twelve years, 
and she is supposed to love as well as to obey 
him all the time, — him, the murderer of her 
children ! This, also, is unnatural, — impossible. 
A year, a month, a week, would have been bad 
enough. The lie was bad in itself. And yet, 
in spite of that utter renouncement of the fic- 
tion, to which civilisation finally brings us, we 
feel for the invincibly obedient creature ; we 
are deeply interested ; we acknowledge instinc- 
tively, that the story had a right to its fame ; 
nay, (not to speak it profanely,) that like other 
permanent and popular stories, of a solemn 
cast, it is a sort of revelation in its way, at 
once startling us with contrasts of good and 
evil, and ending in filling us with hope and 
exaltation. How is this ? 

The secret is, that a principle — the sense of 
duty — is set up in it above all considerations ; 
— that the duty, once believed in by a good 
and humble nature, is exalted by it, in conse- 
quence of its very torments, above all torment, 
and all weakness. We are not expected to 
copy it, much less to approve or be blind to the 
hard-heartedness that fetches it out ; but the 
blow is struck loudly in the ears of mankind, 
in order that they may think of duty itself, and 
draw their own conclusions in favour of their 
own sense of it, when they see what marvellous 
effect it can have even in its utmost extrava- 
gance, and how unable we are to help respect- 
ing it, in proportion to the very depth of its 
self-abasement. We feel that the same woman 
could have gone through any trial which she 
thought becoming a woman, of a kind such as 
we should all admire in the wisest and justest 
ages. We feel even her weakness to be her 
strength, — one of the wonderfullest privileges 
of virtue. 

We are travelling, at present, far out of the 
proposed design of these specimens, which 
were intended to consist of little more than 
extracts, and the briefest possible summary of 
the author's characteristics. But the reader 
will pardon an occasional yielding to tempta- 
tions like these. Our present number shall con- 
sist of as brief a sketch as we can give, of the 
successive incidents of Chaucer's story, which 
are managed with a skill exquisite as the feel- 
ing ; and whenever we come to an irresistible 
Specimen, it shall be extracted. 

At Saluzzo in Piedmont, under the Alps, 

Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, 

there reigned a feudal lord, a Marquis, who was 
beloved by his people, but too much given 
to his amusement, and an enemy of marriage ; 
which alarmed them, lest he should die child- 
less, and leave his inheritance in the hands of 
strangers. They therefore, at last, sent him a 
deputation which addressed him on the subject, 
and he agreed to take a wife, on condition that 



they should respect his choice wheresoever it 
might fall. 

Now among the poorest of the Marquis's 
people, 

There dwelt a man 

Which that was holden poorest of them all, 

But highe God sometime senden can 

His grace unto a little ox's stall ; 

Janicola, men of that thorp him call ; 

A daughter had he fair enough to sight, 

And Grisildis this younge maiden hight. 

Tender of age was " Grisildis" or " Grisilda" 
(for the poet calls her both), but she was a i 
maiden of a thoughtful and steady nature, and ! 
as excellent a daughter as could be, thinking of 
nothing but her sheep, her spinning, and her | 
" old poor father," whom she supported by her 
labour, and waited upon with the greatest duty 
and obedience. 

Upon Griseld', this poore creature, 
Full often sith this marquis set his eye, 
As he on hunting rode peraventure ; 
And when it fell that he might her espy, 
He not with wanton looking of folly 
His eyen cast on her, hut in sad wise 
Upon her cheer he would him oft avise. 

The Marquis announced to his people that 
he had chosen a wife, and the wedding-day 
arrived, but nobody saw the lady ; at which 
there was great wonder. Clothes and jewels 
were prepared, and the feast too ; and the 
Marquis, with a great retinue, and accom- 
panied by music, took his way to the village 
where Griselda lived. 

Griselda had heard of his coming, and said 
to herself, that she would get her work done 
faster than usual, on purpose to stand at the 
door, like other maidens, and see the sight ; 
but just as she was going to look out, she heard 
the Marquis call her, and she set down a 
water-pot she had in her hand, and knelt down 
before him with her usual steady countenance. 

The Marquis asked for her father, and going 
in-doors to him, took him by the hand, and 
said, with many courteous words and leave- 
asking, that he had come to marry his daughter. 
The poor man turned red, and stood abashed 
and quaking, but begged his lord to do as 
seemed good to him ; and then the Marquis 
asked Griselda if she would have him, and vow 
to obey him in all things, be they what they 
might ; and she answered trembling, but in 
like manner ; and he led her forth and pre- 
sented her to the people as his wife. 

The ladies, now Griselda's attendants, took 
off her old peasant's clothes, not much pleased 
to handle them, and dressed her anew in fine 
clothes, so that the people hardly knew her 
again for her beauty. 

Her haired have they comh'd that lay untress^d 
Full rudely, and with their fingers small 
A coroune on her head they have ydressed, 
And set her full of nouches • great and small. 



1 Nouches — nuts? — buttons in that shape made of gold 
or jewellery. . 



62 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



Thus Walter lowly, nay but royally, 
Wedded with fortunate honesty ; 

and Griselda behaved so well, and discreetly, 
and behaved so kindly to every one, making np 
disputes, and speaking such gentle and sensible 
words, 

And coulde so the people's heart embrace, 
That each her lov'th that looketh on her face. 

In due time the Marchioness had a daughter, 
and the Marquis had always treated his consort 
well, and behaved like a man of sense and re- 
flection ; but now he informed her that his 
people were dissatisfied at his having raised her 
to be his wife ; and, reminding her of her vow 
to obey him in all things, told her that she must 
agree to let him do with the little child whatso- 
ever he pleased. Griselda kept her vow to the 
letter, not even changing countenance ; and 
shortly afterwards an ill-looking fellow came, 
and took the child from her, intimating that he 
was to kill it. Griselda asked permission to kiss 
her child ere it died,and she took itin her bosom, 
and blessed and kissed it with a sad face, and 
prayed the man to bury its "little body" in some 
place where the birds and beasts could not get 
it. But the man said nothing. He took the child 
and went his way ; and the Marquis bade him 
carry it to the Countess of Pavia, his sister, with 
directions to bring it up in secret. 

Griselda lived on, behaving like an excellent 
wife, and four years afterwards she had another 
child, a son, which the Marquis demanded of her, 
as he had done the daughter, laying his injunc- 
tions on her at the same time to be patient. 
Griseldasaid she would, adding, as a proof never- 
theless what bitter feelings she had to control, 

I have not had no part of children twain, 
But first, sickness ; and after, woe and pain. 

The same "ugly sergeant" now came again, 
and took away the second child, carrying it 
like the former to Bologna ; and twelve years 
after, to the astonishment and indignation of 
the poet, and the people too, but making no 
alteration whatsoever in the obedience of the 
wife, the Marquis informs her, that his subjects 
are dissatisfied at his having her for a wife at 
all, and that he had got a dispensation from the 
Pope to marry another, for whom she must 
make way, and be divorced, and return home ; 
adding insultingly, that she might take back 
with her the dowry which she brought him. 
Woefully, but ever patiently, does Griselda 
consent, not, however, without a tender excla- 
mation at the difference between her marriage 
day and this ; and as she receives the instruc- 
tion about the dowry as a hint that she is to 
give up her fine clothes, and resume her old 
ones, which she says it would be impossible to 
find, she makes him the following exquisite 
prayer and remonstrance. — If we had to write 
for only a certain select set of readers, never 
should we think of bespeaking their due rever- 
ence for a passage like the following, and its 



simple, primitive, and most affecting thoughts 
and words. But a publication like the present 
must accommodate itself to the chances of 
perusal in all quarters, either by alteration or 
explanation ; and, therefore, in not altering any 
of these words, or daring to gainsay the sacred 
tenderness they bringbef ore us, we must observe, 
that as there is not a more pathetic passage to 
be found in the whole circle of human writ, so 
the pathos and the pure words go inseparably 
together: and his is the most refined heart, 
educated or uneducated, that receives them 
with the delicatest and profoundest emotion. 

" My Lord, ye wot that in my father's place 
Ye did me strip out of my poore weed, 

[How much, by the way, this old and more 
lengthened pronunciation of the word poor, 
poore (French, pauvre,) adds to the piteous 
emphasis of it.] 

And richely ye clad me of your grace ; 
To you brought I nought elles out of drede, " 
But faith, and nakedness, and ' womanhede ; 
And here again your clothing I restore, 
And eke your wedding ring, for evermore. 
' ' The remnant of your jewels ready be 
Within your * chamber,' I dare safely sain. 
Naked out of my father's house (quoth she) 
I came, and naked I must turn again. 

[How beautifully is the Bible used here !] 

All your pleasanc^ would I follow fain ; 
But yet I hope it be not your intent 
That I smockless out of your palace went 

" Ye could not do so dishondst a thing 
That thilkd 2 womb in which your children lay, 
Shouldd before the people, in my walking 
Be seen all bare; wherefore, I you pray, 
Let me not like a worm go by the way: 
Remember you, mine owen Lord so dear, 
J was your wife, though I unworthy were. 

" Wherefore in guerdon of my ' womanhede,' 
Which that I brought and 4 yet' again I bear, 
As vouchesafe to give me to my meed 
But such a smock as I was wont to wear, 
That I therewith may wrie 3 the womb of her 
That was your wife. And here I take my leave 
Of you, mine owen Lord, lest I you grieve." 

"The smock," quoth he, "that thou hast on thy 
Let it be still, and bear it forth with thee." [back, 
But well unnethes * thilke word he spake, 
But went his way for ruth and for pittie, 
Before the folk herselven strippeth she, 
And in her smock, with foot and head all bare, 
Toward her father's house, forth is she fare. 

The people follow her weeping and wailing,'but 
she went ever as usual, with staid eyes, nor all 
the while did she speak a word. As to her poor 
father, he cursed the day he was born. And so 
with her father, for a space, dwelt " this flower 
of wifely patience," nor showed any sense of 
offence, nor remembrance of her high estate. 

At length arrives news of the coming of the 
new Marchioness, with such array of pomp as 
had never been seen in all Lombardy ; and the 
Marquis, who has, in the mean time, sent to 
Bologna for his son and daughter, once more 
desires Griselda to come to him, and tells her, 

i Out of drede— without doubt. 2 Thilke— this, 

s Wrie— cover. 4 Unnethes— scarcely. 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



C3 



that as he has not women enough in his house- 
hold to wait upon his new wife, and set every- 
thing in order for her, he must request her to do 
it ; which she does, with all ready obedience, 
and then goes forth with the rest, to meet the 
new lady. At dinner, the Marquis again calls 
her, and asks her what she thinks of his choice. 
She commends it heartily, and prays God to 
give him prosperity ; only adding, that she 
hopes he will not try the nature of so young a 
creature as he tried hers, since she has been brought 
up more tenderly, and perhaps could not bear it. 

And when this Walter saw her patience, 
Her gladde cheer, and no malice at all, 
And he so often had her done offence, 
And she aye sad * and constant as a wall, 
Continuing aye her innocence over all, 
This sturdy marquis 'gan his hearte dress 
To rue upon her wifely stedfastness. 

He gathers her in his arms, and kisses her ; 
but she takes no heed of it, out of astonish- 
ment, nor hears anything he says ; upon which he 
exclaims, that as sure as Christ died for him, 
she is his wife, and he will have no other, nor 
ever had ; — and with that, he introduces his 
supposed bride to her as her own daughter, 
with his son by her side ; and Griselda, over- 
come at last, faints away. 

When she this heard, aswoone down she falleth 

For piteous joy ; and after her swooning 

She both her younge children to her calleth, 

And in her armes piteously weeping, 

Embraceth them, and tenderly kissing 

Full Hke a mother with her salte tears 

She bathed both their visage and their hairs. 

O, such a piteous thing it was to see 

Her swooning, and her humble voice to hear ! 

" Grand mercy J Lord, God thank it you (quoth she), 

That ye have saved me my children dear : 

Now reck 2 I never to he dead right here, 

Since I stand in your love and in your grace, 

No force of death, 3 nor when my spirit pace. 

" O tender, O dear, O younge children mine ! 

Your woful mother weened steadfastly 

That cruel houndes or some foul vermin 

Had eaten you : but God of his mercy 

And your benigne father tenderly 

Hath done you keep ;" and in that same stound 

All suddenly she swapp'd adown to ground. 

And in her swoon so sadly holdeth she 
Her children two when she 'gan them embrace, 
That tvith great sleight and great difficulty 
The children from her arm they 'gan arrace. 4 
! many a tear on many a piteous face 
Doicn ran of them that stooden her beside; 
Unnethe abouten her might they abide. 

That is, they could scarcely remain to look at 
her, or stand still. — And so, with feasting and 
joy, ends this divine, cruel story of Patient 
Griselda ; the happiness of which is superior 
to the pain, not only because it ends so well, 
but because there is ever present in it, like 
that of a saint in a picture, the sweet, sad face 
of the fortitude of woman. 

1 Sad — composed in manner — unaltered. 2 Reck — care. 

3 No force of death — no matter for death. 

4 Arrace— (French, arracher) pluck 



XXIX.— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 

NO. V. FURTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PLEASANTRY 

AND SATIRE. 
THE FAIRIES SUPERSEDED BY THE FRIARS. 

Chaucer was one of the Reformers of his 
time, and, like the celebrated poets and wits 
of most countries, Catholic included, took 
pleasure in exposing the abuses of the church ; 
not because he was an ill-natured man, and 
disliked the church itself (for no one has done 
greater honour to the true Christian pastor 
than he, in a passage already quoted,) but 
because his very good-nature and love of 
truth made him the more dislike the abuses 
of the best things in the most reverend places. 
He measures his satire, however, according to 
its desert, and is severest upon the severe and 
mercenary, — the holders of such livings as give 
no life but rather take it. In the following 
exquisite banter he rallies the more jovial and 
plebeian part of the church, the ordinary 
begging-friars, with a sly good-humour. And 
observe how he contrives to sprinkle the 
passage with his poetry. The versification 
also is obviously good, even to the most modern 
ears. 

In old£ dayes of the King Artour, 

Of which that Britons speaken great honour, 

All was this land fulfill'd of Faery ; 

The Elf -queen with her jolly company 

Danced full oft in many a greene mead. 

This was the old opinion, as I read ; 

I speak of many hundred years ago, 

But now can no man see none elves mo ; 

For now the greate charity and prayers 

Of limiters and other holy freres, 

That search en every land and every stream, 

As thick as motes in the sunne beem, 

Blessing halles, chambers, kitchenes, and boAvers, 

Cities and boroughs, castles high and towers, 

Thorpes and barne"s, shepenes and dairies, 

This maketh that there be no Faeries : 

For there as wont to walken was an elf, 

There walketh now the limiter himself 

In undermeales and in morrowings, 

And saith his matins and his holy things 

As he go'th in his limitation. 

Women may now go safely up and down ; 

In every bush, and under every tree, 

There is no other Incubus but he. 

AN IMPUDENT DRUNKEN SELLER OF PARDONS AND 
INDULGENCES CONFESSES FOR WHAT HE PREACHES. 

Lordings, quoth he, in church^ when I preach 
I paine me to have an hautein speech, 

(I do my best to speak out loud) 

And ring it out, as round as go'th a bell, 
For I can all by rote that I tell ; 

(I learn all I say by heart) 

My theme is always one, and ever was, 
Radix malorum est cupiditas. 

" Covetousness is the root of all evil." Chaucer 
has fitted his Latin capitally well in with the 
measure, — a nicety singularly ill observed by 
poets in general. 



64 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



First I pronounce whenn^s that I come, 
And then my Dulles 

(the Pope's bulls) 

show I, all and some ; 
Our liege lorde's seal on my patent, 
That show I first, my body to warrent, 
That no man be so bold, nor priest, nor clerk, 
Me to disturb in Christes holy work ; 
And after that, then tell I forth my tales ; 
Bulles of Popes and of Cardinales, 
Of Patriarchs, and of Bishopes, I show, 
And in Latin I speak a wordes few, 
To saffron with my predication, 

(To give a colour and relish to his sermon, 
like saffron in pastry) — 

And for to steer men to devotion. 

The preacher here banters his own relics, and 
then proceeds with the following ludicrous 
picture and exquisitely impudent avowal : — 

Then pain I me to stretchen forth my neck, 
And east and west upon the people I beck, 
As doth a dove sitting tipon a barn : 
My handes and my tongue gone so yearn — 

(Go so briskly together) — 

That it is joy to see my business. 

Of avarice and of such cursedness 

Is all my preaching, for to make them free 

To give their pence, and namely,— unto me ; 

For mine intent is nought but for to win, 

And nothing for correction of sin ; 

I reck never, when that they be buried, 

Though that their soules gone a black-berrried. 

(That is, — though their souls go by bushels 
into the lower regions, like so many black- 
berries.) 

Therefore — 

(repeats he, at the end of the next paragraph, 
varying the note a little like a relishing musi- 
cian, — ) 

Therefore my theme is yet and ever was, 
Radix malorum est cupiditas. 

IRONICAL BIT OF TRANSLATION. 

In the story of the Cock and the Fox, the 
gallant bird, who has been alarmed by the 
fox, is complimenting his favourite wife, and 
introduces some Latin, the real purport of 
which is that the fair sex are the " confusion 
of mankind," but which, he informs her, signi- 
fies something quite the reverse. Sir Walter 
Scott admired this passage. 

But let us speak of mirth, and stint all this. 



(Stop all this) — 



Madame Partelot, so have I bliss, 
Of one thing God hath sent me large grace, 
For when I see the beauty of your face, 
Ye be so scarlet red about your eyen, 
It maketh all my dreade for to dien ; 
For all so siker as 

(As sure as — ) 

"In principio 
Mutter est hominis confusio ;" 
Madam, the sentence of this Latin is, 
" Woman is mannes joy, and mannes bliss. 



In principio, mulier est hominis confusio — 
Woman, from the first, was the confusion of 
man. " In principio" observes Sir Walter, in 
a note on the passage in his edition of Dryden,' 
refers to the beginning of Saint John's Gospel. 
And in a note on the word confusio, he says it 
is taken from a fabulous conversation between 
the Emperor Adrian and the philosopher Secun- 
dus, reported by Vincent de Beauvais, in his 
* Speculum Historiale.' Quid est mulier ? Hominis 
confusio : insaturabilis bestia, fyc. What is woman ? 
The confusion of man, &c. " The Cock's polite 
version (he adds) is very ludicrous." 

How pleasant to hear one great writer thus 
making another laugh, as if they were sitting 
over a table together, though five centuries 
are between them. But genius can make 
the lightest as well as gravest things the 
property of all time. Its laughs, as well as its 
sighs, are immortal. 



XXX.— SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 

NO. VI. — MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS DESCRIP- 
TION, PORTRAIT-PAINTING, AND FINE SENSE. 
BIRDS IN THE SPRING. 

Full lusty was the weather and benign ; 
For which the fowls against the sunne sheen 
(What for the season and the younge green) 
Full loude sungen their affecti6ns: 
Them seemed had getten them protections 
Against the sword of winter, keen and cold. 

Squire's Tale. 

patience and equal dealing in love. 
For one thing, Sirs, safely dare I say, 
That friendes ever each other must obey, 
If they will longe holden company : 
Love will not be constrain'd by mastery : 
When mastery cometh, the god of Love anon 
Beateth his wings, and farewell ! he is gone. 

[Compare the ease, life, and gesticulation of this 
— the audible suddenness and farewell of it — with 
the balanced and formal imitation by Pope — 

" Love, free as air, at sight of human ties 
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies."] 

Love is a thing as, any spirit, free. 
Women of kind desiren liberty, 
And not to be constrained as a thrall ; 
And so do men, if soothly I say shall. 
Look, who that is most patient in love, 
He is at his advantage all above ; 

(he has the advantage over others that are 
not so.) 

Patience is a high virtue certain, 
For it vanquisheth, as these clerkessain, 
Thinges that rigour never should attain ; 
For every word men should not chide or plain. 
Leameth to suff'ren — 



(learn to suffer) 
(so may I prosper) 



or, so may I gone, 



Ye shall it learn, whether ye will or non. 

The Franklin's Tale. 



SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. 



G5 



INABILITY TO DIB. 

Three drunken rioters go out to kill Death, 
who meets them in the likeness of a decrepit 
old man, and directs them to a treasure which 
brings them to their destruction. The old 
man only is given here. 

When they had gone not fully half a mile, 

Right as they would have trodden o'er a stile, 

An old man and a poore with them met ; 

This olde man full meekely them gret, 

And saide thus ; " Now, Lordes, God you see !" 

The proudest of these riotoures three 

Answered again ; " What ? churl, with sorry grace, 

Why art thou all forwrapped save thy face ? 

Why livest thou so long in so great age ? " 

This olde man 'gan look in his visage, 
And saide thus ; " For I ne cannot find 
A man, though that I walked into Ind, 
Neither in city nor in no village, 
That woulde change his youthe for mine age ; 
And therefore must I have mine ag£ still 
As longe time as it is Goddes will. 
Ne Death, alas ! ne will not have my life : 
Thus walk I, like a resteless caitiff, 
And on the ground, which is my mother's gate, 
I knocke with my staff early and late, 
And say to her, ' Leve mother, let me in, 
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and hlood, and skin. 
Alas ! when shall my hones he at rest ? 
Mother, with you would I change my chest, 
That in my chamber longe time hath be, 
Yea, for an hairy clout to wrap in me. ' " 

(That is, for a coffin and a winding-sheet of 
hair-cloth.) 

DESCRIPTION OF THE COCK. 

(In the story of the " Cock and the Fox .") 
His comb was redder than thejine coral, 
Embatteled as it were a castle wall ; 
His bill was black, and as the jet it shone, 
Like azure were his legges and his tone ,• 

(His toes) 

His nailis whiter than the lily flower, 
And like theburnid gold was his coldur, 

Compare the above verses (taking care of the 
accent) with the most popular harmonies of 
Pope, and see into what a flowing union of 
strength and sweetness the " old poet" could 
get, when he chose. 

He flew down from his beam, 
For it was day, and eke his hennas all ; 
And with a chuck he 'gan them for to call, 
For he had found a corn lay in the yard ; 
Roj-al he was, he was no more afeard. 

(He had been frightened by a fox.) 

He looketh, as it were a grim leoun , 



(Lion) 



And on his toes he roameth up and down ; 
Hedeigneth not to set his foot to ground ; 
He chucketh when he hath a corn yfound, 
And to him runnen then his wives all. 



PORTRAIT OF A FEMALE. 



This is in the pure, unfaltering style of the 
old Italian painters. The simile in the third 
line is one of thequaintnessesof an age in which 



books were rare, — the key to almost all the 
quaintnesses of Chaucer. The rest of them 
are connected with his adherence to the origi- 
nals from which he translated, and only 
appear strange from difference of time or 
national customs. A want of consideration 
to this effect led Mr. Hazlitt into an error, 
when he instanced that pleasant, scornful 
admonition to the sun in Troilus and Creseida, 
(to go and sell his light to them that " engrave 
small seals,") as an evidence of Chaucer's 
minuteness and particularity. 

The original of Troilus and Creseida was by 
an Italian ; and in Italy the seal-engravers 
of those times were famous, and in great 
employ ; nor was anything more natural for a 
lover, angry with the day-time, than to tell the 
sun to go and give his light to those that so 
notoriously needed it. 

Among those other folk was Creseida 
In widow's habit black ; but natheless 
Right as our first letter is now an A, 
In beauty first so stood she makeless ; 

(Matchless) 

Her goodly looking gladded all the press; 
' N'as never seen thing to be praised so dear, 
Nor under cloude black so bright a star, 

[What a pity this fine line did not terminate 
with a full stop ! but he goes on — ] 

As was Creseid,' they saiden evereach one, 
That her behelden in her blacke weed ; 
And yet she stood full low and still alone, 
Behind all other folks in little brede, 

(In small space) 

And nigh the door, aye under shames drede, 

(that is, not shame-faced, but apprehensive 
of being put to shame, — put out of her self- 
possession) 

Simple of attire and debonnair of cheer ,- 
With full-assured looking and mannere. 

Troilus thus seeing her for the first time, 
looks hard at her, like a town-gallant ; and 
she, being town-bred herself, for all her 
unaffectedness, thinks it necessary to let him 
understand that he is not to stare at her. 

She n'as not with the most of her stature, 

(her stature was not of the tallest) . 

But all her limbes so well answering 
Weren to womanhood, that creature 
Was never lesse mannish in seeming, 
And eke the pure wise of her meaning 
She showed well 

(her manner was so correspondent with her 
meaning) 

that men might in her guess 

Honour, estate, and womanly nobless. 
Then Troilus, right wonder well withal, 
'Gan for to like her meaning and her cheer, 
Which somedeal deignous was, 

(was a little haughty) 



6G 



PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. 



-for she let fall 



Her look a little aside, in such manners 
Aseaunces — " What ! may I not standen here 9" 
And after that her looking 'gan she light,- 

(began to lighten — to restore to its former 
ease) 

That never thought him see so good a sight. 

Chaucer is very fond of painting these 
womanly portraits, especially the face. Here 
is — 

ANOTHEB, 

introduced to us with a piece of music. The 
succession of adverbs at the end of the first 
five lines, makes a beat upon the measure, 
analogous to the dance he is speaking of — 

I saw her dance so comely, 

Carol and sing so sweetly, 

And laugh and play so womanly, 

And looken so debonairly, 

So goodly speak and so friendly. 

That certes I trow that evermore 

N'as seen so blissful a treasure. 

For every haire on her head, 

Me soth to say it was not red, 

Ne neither yellow, nor brown it n'as ; 

Methought most like to gold it was. 

And which eyen my lady had, 

Debonaire, good, and glad, and sad ; 

(sad is in earnest) 

Simple, of good muchel, not too wide ; 
Thereto her look was not aside 
Nor overthawt, but beset 60 well, 
It drew and took up every deal, 



(entirely) 



All which that on her 'gan behold ; 
Her eyen seemed anon she would 
Have mercy. Folly weenden so, 
But it was ne'er the rather do ; 

(She looked so good-natured, that folly itself 
thought she was at its service ; though folly 
was much mistaken.) 

It was no counterfeited thing ,- 
It was her own puke looking. 

A charming couplet ! And he need not have 
said any more ; but he was so fond of the face, 
he could not help going on : — 

Were she ne'er so glad, 
Her looking was not foolish spread. 

Though dulness itself, he tells us, was abso- 
lutely " afraid of her style of life, it was so 
cheerful." 

I have no wit that can suffice 
To comprehenden her beauty. 

(To describe it comprehensively.) 

But thus much I dare say, that she 
Was white, ruddy, fresh, lively hued, 
And every day her beauty newed. 
* * * * Beit ne'er so dark 
Me thinketh I see her evermo ; 

(If all they, says the poet) 

That ever lived were now alive, 

Ne would they have found to descrive 



In all her face a wicked sign, 
For it was sad, simple and benign. 

The Book of the Duchess. 

And there is a great deal more of the descrip- 
tion. 

GOING TO SLEEP IN HEARING OF A NIGHTINGALE. 

A nightingale upon a cedar green, 

Under the chamber wall there as she lay. 

Full loud ysimg again the moone sheen, 

Par 'venture, in his birdes wise, a lay 

Of love, that made her hearte fresh and gay ; 

That hearkened she so long in good intent, 

Till at the last the deade sleep her hent. 

Troilus and Creseida. 

EXQUISITE COMPARISON OF A NIGHTINGALE, WITH CONFI- 
DENCE AFTEK FEAR. 

And as the new abashed nightingale, 
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing, 
When that she heareth any herdds tale, 

(herdsman counting his flock) 

Or in the hedges any wight stirring ; 
And after, siker doth her voice outring ; 

(Siker is securely) 

Right so Creseide", when that her aread stent, 
Opened her heart, and told him her intent. 

We conclude this long article very unwillingly 
(having to omit a Imndred beautiful passages,) 
with a specimen of Chaucer's philosophy, 
particularly fit to honour these pages : 

For thilke ground that beareth the weedes wick 

(wicked or poisonous) 

Bear'th eke these wholesome herbes as full oft ; 
And next to the foul nettle rough and thick, 
The rose ywaxeth sote, and smooth, and soft ,- 
And next the valley is the hill aloft ; 
And next the darke night is the glad morrow. 
And also joy is next the fine of sorrow. 



XXXI.— PETER WILKINS AND THE 
FLYING WOMEN. 

The " Adventures of Peter Wilkins " is a 
book written about a hundred years back, 
purporting to be the work of a shipwrecked 
voyager, and relating the discovery of a people 
who had wings. It is mentioned somewhere, 
with great esteem, by Mr. Southey, if our 
memory does not deceive us ; and has been 
altogether so much admired, and so popular, 
that we are surprised Mr. Dunlop has omitted 
it in his " History of Fiction." The name, 
" Peter Wilkins," has, to the present perplexed 
and aspiring generation (not yet knowing 
what to retain and what to get rid of) a poor 
and vulgar sound. It is not Montreville, or 
Mordaunt, or Montgomery. "Peter" is not 
the name for a card. " Wilkins " hardly 
announces himself as a diner with dukes. 
But a hundred years ago people did not con- 
ceive that a gentleman's pretensions were 
nominal. What novelist now-a-days would 



PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. 



67 



call his hero " Tom Jones ? " Yet thus was 
his great work christened by Fielding, a man 
of noble family. However, there is a " prefer- 
ment " in the instinct of this aspiration. 
Society has had a lift, and is inclined to take 
everything for an advantage and an elegance, 
which it sees in possession of its new company. 
By-and-by, it will be content with the real 
elegances, and drop the pretended. 

It is a great honour to a writer to invent a 
being at once new and delightful ; and the 
honour is not the less, for the apparent obvi- 
ousness of the invention. Let any one try to 
make a new combination of this sort, and he 
will find how difficult it is. We will venture 
to say, that besides genius in the ordinary 
sense of the word, there is a faith in it, and a 
remoteness from thiDgs worldly, that implies 
a virtue and a child-like simplicity, not com- 
mon but to minds of the higher order. Some 
writers would think they were going to be 
merely childish ; and would very properly 
desist. Others would be apprehensive of ridi- 
cule ; and would desist with like reason. Not 
that everybody would succeed, who fancied he 
should. Taste and judgment are requisite to 
all good inventions, as well as an imagination 
to find them ; and there must be, above all, a 
strong taste for the truth ; verisimilitude, or 
the likeness of truth, being the great charm in 
the wildest of fictions. It is very difficult to 
unite the imaginative with the worldly ; and 
men of real genius sometimes make mistakes, 
in consequence, fit only for the most literal or 
incoherent understandings. 

We have headed our article "Flying Women," 
instead of the Flying People, because, though 
the beings discovered by our friend Peter are 
of both sexes, we could never quite persuade 
ourselves that his males had an equal right to 
their graundee. All however, that he says 
about the Flying Nation as a people is ingeni- 
ous. He has escaped, in particular, in a most 
happy manner, from the difficulty of introduc- 
ing his plain-backed hero among them without 
lessening his dignity, by means of implicating 
him with a prophecy important to their well- 
being ; and his speculations upon their religion 
and policy, show him to have been a man of 
an original turn of reflection in everything ; 
good-hearted, and zealous for the advancement 
of mankind. But his lords, his architects, and 
his miners, violate the remoteness of his inven- 
tion, and bring it back to common-place ; nor 
was this necessary to render his work useful. , 
The utility of a work of imagination consists 
in softening and elevating the mind generally; 
and this is the effect of his Flying Woman. 
All that relates to her is luckily set in a frame 
by itself ; is remote, quiet, and superior. She 
is as much above Peter's race in sincerity, as 
in her wings ; and yet there is nothing about 
her, which, in a higher state of humanity, the 
author does- not succeed in making us suppose 



possible. Peter is even raised towards her by 
dint of his admiration of her truth ; and the 
sweetness of her disposition more than meets 
him half-way, and sets them both on a level. 

The author of this curious invention must 
have been a very modest as well as clever man, 
or have had some peculiar reasons for keeping 
his name a secret ; for he was living when the 
work arrived at a second edition. The dedica- 
tion does not appear in the first ; and the 
writer, who signs himself R. P. speaks in it of 
the heroine as his property. It is observable, 
that in all the editions we have met with, the 
initials B. P. are signed to the dedication, 
while B. S. is put in the title-page. This also 
looks like a negligence uncommon in authors. 
The dedication is to Elizabeth, Countess of 
Northumberland ; the lady to whom Bishop 
Percy dedicated his ' Beliques of Ancient Eng- 
lish Poetry.' We have sometimes fancied that 
Abraham Tucker wrote it, or Bishop Berkeley. 
It has all the ease and the cordial delicacy of 
the best days that followed the " Tatler," as 
well as their tendency to theological discussion. 
The mediocrity of the author's station in life 
might have been invented, to make the picture 
of a sea-faring philosopher more real ; though 
the names of the children, Tommy and Pedro, 
hardly seem a contrast which a scholar could 
have allowed himself to give into. The turn 
of words, invented for the flying people, is 
copied from Swift, and cannot be called happy. 
There is a want of analogy in them to the 
smoothness, and even the energy, of flying. 
The ancient name of the country, Nosmnbdsgrsutt, 
is more fit for that of the Houhynhyms. Arm- 
drumstake, Babbrindrugg, Crashdoorpt, and Hunkun 
(marriage,) and Glumm (a man,) are words too 
ugly for any necessity of looking natural. 
We are hardly reconciled to the name of 
Youwarkee for the heroine. Gawrey (a woman) 
is hardly so good ; but the Graundee, the name 
of the flying apparatus, will do. There is a 
grandeur in it. We see it expand and " display 
its pomp," as Tasso says of the peacock. The 
hero's name was most likely suggested by that 
of a celebrated advocate of the possibility of 
flying, Wilkins, Bishop of Chester*. Upon the 
whole, if we were in possession of the Berkeley 
Manuscripts, we should look hard to find a 
memorandum indicative of the Bishop's being 
the author of this delightful invention. Even 
the miners seem to belong to the author of the 
Bermuda scheme ; and he had traversed the 
seas, and been conversant with all honest 
paths of life. There would also have appeared 
to him good reason for not avowing the book, 
how Christian soever, when he came to be a 

* The Bishop is said to have been asked by the flighty 
Duchess of Newcastle, how people who took a voyage to 
the moon were to manage for ' ' baiting-places ? " to which 
he replied, with great felicity, that he wondered at such a 
question from her Grace, "who had built so many castles 
in the air." 

f 2 



; 68 



PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. 



Bishop. But these inquiries are foreign to 
our pages. 

A peacock, with his plumage displayed, full 
of " rainbows and starry eyes," is a fine object ; 
but think of a lovely woman set in front of 
an ethereal shell, and wafted about like a 
Venus. This is perhaps the best general idea 
that can be given of Peter Wilkins's bride. 
In the first edition of the work, published in 
1751 (at least we know of none earlier), there 
is an engraved explanation of the wings, or 
rather drapery, for such it was when at rest. 
It might be called a natural webbed-silk. We 
are to picture to ourselves a nymph in a vest of 
the finest texture and most delicate carnation. 
On a sudden, this drapery parts in two and 
flies back, stretched from head to foot behind 
the figure like an oval fan or umbrella ; and 
the lady is in front of it, preparing to sweep 
blushing away from us, and " winnow the 
buxom air." 

It has been objected, that the wings of 
Peter's woman consist rather of something 
laced and webbed than proper angelical wings, 
that this something serves her also for drapery, 
that the drapery therefore is alive, and that 
we should be shocked to find it warm and 
stirring. The objection is natural in a merely 
animal point of view ; and yet, speaking for 
ourselves, we confess we have been so accus- 
tomed to idealities, and to aspirations after 
the predominancy of moral beauty in physical, 
that it is with an effort we allow it to be so. 
Supposing it, at first, to be something to which 
we should have to grow reconciled, we con- 
ceive, that pity for the supposed deformity 
would only endear us the more to the charming 
and perfect womanhood to which it was attached. 
We have often thought, that real tenderness 

1 for the sex would not be so great or so touch- 
ing — certainly it could not be so well proved, 
— if women partook less than they do of im- 
perfection. But the etherial power as well as 
grace belonging to our flying beauties could 
not long permit us to associate the idea with 
deformity. Our admiration of beauty, as it is, 
(unless we hold, with some philosophers, that it 
is a direct ordinance of the Divine Being), is 
the effect of custom and kind offices. It is 
true, there is something in mere smoothness 
and harmony of form, which appears to be suf- 
ficient of itself to affect us with pleasing emo- 
tions, distinct from any reference to moral 
beauty ; but the last secrets of pleasures the 

! most material are in the brain and the imagi- 
nation. The lowest sensualist, if he were 
capable of reflection, would find that he was 
endeavouring to grasp some shadow of grace 
and kindliness, even when he fancied himself 
least given to such refinements. The worst like 
to receive pleasures from the best. The most 
hypocritical seducer, in the sorry improvidence 
of his selfishness, seeks to be mistaken for what 
he is not ; to enjoy innocence instead of guilt ; to 



read in the eyes of simplicity what a transport 
it is to be loved : and to piece out the instinc- 
tive consciousness of his own want of a just 
moral power, by the stealing of one that is un- 
just. Being a man, he cannot help these 
involuntary tributes to the soul of beauty. If 
it were otherwise, he would be an idiot, or a 
fly on the wall. We think it, therefore, perfectly 
natural in our friend Peter, seeing of what 
lovely elements the mind as well as the body 
of his new acquaintance is composed, to feel 
nothing but admiration for an appendage 
which doubles her power to do him good, and 
which realises what it is natural for us all to 
long for in our dreams. The wish to fly seems 
to belong instinctively to all imaginative states 
of being — to dreams, to childhood, and to love. 
Flying seems the next step to a higher state 
of being. If we could fancy human nature 
taking another degree in the scale, and dis- 
placing the present inhabitants of the world 
by a new set of creatures, personally improved, 
the result of a climax in refinement, what we 
should expect in them would be wings to their 
shoulders. 

We proceed to lay before our readers, from 
the complete edition of this romance*, the 
passages describing our hero's first knowledge 
of the flying people, and the account of his 
bride and her behaviour. 

" As I lay awake (says our voyager) one night or 
day, I know not which, I very plainly heard the 
sound of several human voices, and sometimes very 
loud ; but though I could easily distinguish the 
articulations, I could not understand the least word 
that was said ; nor did the voices seem at all to 
me like such as I had anywhere heard before, but 
much softer and more musical. This startled me, 
and I arose immediately, slipping on my clothes, and 
taking my gun in my hand (which I always kept 
charged, being my constant travelling companion), 
and my cutlass. I was inclined to open the door 
of my ante-chamber, but I own I was afraid ; 
besides, I considered that I could discover nothing 
at any distance, by reason of the thick and gloomy 
wood that inclosed me. 

" I had a thousand different surmises about 
the meaning of this odd incident ; and could not 
conceive how any human creatures should be 
in my kingdom (as I called it) but myself, as 
I never yet saw them or any trace of their habi- 
tation. 

u These thoughts kept me still more within doors 
than before, and I hardly ever stirred out but for 
water or firing. At length, hearing no more voices 
nor seeing any one, I began to be more composed 
in my mind, and at last grew persuaded it was all 
a mere delusion, and only a fancy of mine without 
any real foundation : so the whole notion was soon 
blown over. 

" I had not enjoyed my tranquillity above a week 

* Some abridgments, purporting to be the entire work, 
afford almost as inadequate an idea of it in spirit as in 
letter. One or two of Stothard's designs, in the edition 
in the " Novelist's Magazine," do justice to the grace and 
delicacy of the heroine. 



PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. 



6!) 



before ray fears were roused afresh, hearing the 
same sound of voices twice in the same night, but 
not many minutes at a time, and I was resolved 
not to venture out ; but then I determined, if they 
should come again anything near my grotto, to 
open the door, see who they were, and stand upon 
my defence, whatever came of it. Thus had I 
formed my scheme, but I heard no more of them 
for a great while, so that at length I became tran- 
quil again. 

******* 

" I passed the summer (though I had never yet 
seen the sun's body) very much to my satisfaction : 
partly in the work I had been describing (for I 
had taken two more seals, and had a great 
quantity of oil from them,) partly in building me 
a chimney in my ante-chamber of mud and earth 
burnt on my own hearth into a sort of brick ; in 
making a window at one end of the above-said 
chamber, to let in what little light would come 
through the trees when I did not choose to open 
my door ; in moulding an earthen lamp for my 
oil ; and finally in providing and laying stores, 
fresh and salt (for I had now cured and dried 
many more fish), against winter. These I say 
were my summer employments at home, inter- 
mixed with many agreeable excursions. But now 
the whiter coming on, and the days growing very 
short, or indeed there being no day, properly 
speaking, but a kind of twilight, kept mostly in my 
habitation, though not so much as I had done the 
winter before, when I had no light within doors, 
and slept, or at least lay still, great part of my time ; 
for now my lamp was never out. I also turned 
two of my seal-skins into a rug to cover my bed, and 
the third into a cushion, which I always sat upon, 
and a very soft warm cushion it made. All this 
together rendered my life very easy, nay even 
comfortable ; but a little while after the darkness 
or twilight came on, I frequently heard the voices 
again ; sometimes in great numbers. This threw 
me into new fears, and T became as uneasy as ever, 
even to the degree of growing quite melancholy. 

"At length one night, or day, I cannot say which, 
hearing the voices very distinctly, and praying very 
earnestly to be either delivered from the uncer- 
tainty they had put me under, or to have them 
removed from me, I took courage, and arming 
myself with a gun, listened to distinguish from 
whence the voices proceeded ; when I felt such a 
thump upon the roof of my ante-chamber as shook 
the whole fabric, and set me all over into a tremor ; 
I then heard a sort of shriek and a rustle near the 
door of my apartment ; all which together seemed 
very terrible. But T having before determined to 
see what and who it was, resolutely opened my 
door, and leaped out. I saw nobody ; all was quite 
silent, and nothing that I could perceive, but my 
own fears, a-moving. I went then softly to the 
corner of my building, and there looking down, by 
the glimmer of my lamp, which stood in the win- 
dow, I saw something in human shape lying at my 
feet. I asked, Who's there ? No one answering, I 
was induced to take a near view of the object. 
But judge of my astonishment when I discovered 
the face of the most lovely and beautiful woman 
eyes ever beheld ! I stood for a few seconds 
transfixed with astonishment, and my heart was 
ready to force its way through my sides. At 
length, somewhat recovering, I perceived her 



more minutely. But if I was puzzled at beholding 
a woman alone in this lonely place, how much 
more was I surprised at her appearance and dress. 
She had a sort of brown chaplet, like lace, round 
her head, under and about which her hair was 
tucked up and twined ; and she seemed to me to 
be clothed in a thin hair-coloured silk garment, 
which upon trying to raise her, I found to be 
quite warm, and, therefore hoped there was life 
in the body it contained. I then took her in my 
arms, and conveyed her through the door-way 
into my grotto : where I laid her upon my bed. 

" When I laid her down, I thought, on laying my 
hand on her breast, I perceived the fountain of 
life had some motion. This gave me infinite 
pleasure ; so warming a drop of wine I dipped 
my finger in it and moistened her lips two or three 
times, and I imagined they opened a little. Upon 
this I bethought me, and taking a tea-spoon, I 
gently poured a few drops of the wine by that 
means into her mouth. Finding she swallowed it, 
I poured in another spoonful and another, till I 
brought her to herself so well as to be able to sit up. 

" I then spoke to her, and asked her divers ques- 
tions as if she understood me ; in return of which 
she uttered language I had no idea of, though in 
the most musical tone, and with the sweetest 
accent I ever heard. 

" You may imagine we stared heartily at each 
other, and I doubted not but she wondered as 
much as I by what means we came so near each 
other. I offered her everything in my grotto 
which I thought might please her ; some of which 
she gratefully received, as appeared by her looks 
and behaviour. But she avoided my lamp, and 
always placed her back towards it. I observed 
that, and took care to set it in such a position my- 
self as seemed agreeable to her, though it deprived 
me of a prospect I very much admired. 

" After we had sat a good while, now and then I 
may say, chattering to one another, she got up and 
took a turn or two about the room. When I saw 
her in that attitude, her grace and motion per- 
fectly charmed me, and her shape was incompar- 
able ; but the straitness of her dress put me to 
a loss to conceive either what it was, or how it 
was put on. 

" Well, we supped together, and I set the best of 
everything I had before her, nor could either of us 
forbear speaking in our own tongue, though we 
were sensible neither of us understood the other. 
After supper I gave her some of my cordials, for 
which she showed great tokens of thankfulness. 
When supper had been some time over, I showed 
her my bed and made signs for her to go to it ; 
but she seemed very shy of that, till I showed her 
where I meant to lie myself, by pointing to myself, 
then to that, and again pointing to her and to my 
bed. When at length I had made this matter in- 
telligible to her, she lay down very composedly ; 
and after I had taken care of my fire, and set the 
things I had been using for supper in their places, 
I laid myself down too. 

" I treated her for some time with all the respect 
imaginable, and never suffered her to do the least 
part of my work. It was very inconvenient to 
both of us only to know each other's meaning by 
signs ; but I could not be otherwise than pleased 
to see, that she endeavoured all in her power to 
learn to talk like me. Indeed, I was not behind- 



70 



PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. 



hand with her in that respect, striving all I could 
to imitate her. With this we at last succeeded so 
well, that in a few months we were able to hold a 
conversation with each other. 

" After my new love had been with me a fort- 
night, finding my water run very low, I was greatly 
troubled at the thought of quitting her to go for 
more ; and, as well as I could, entreated her not to 
go away before my return. As soon as she under- 
stood what I signified to her, she sat down with 
her arms across, leaning her head against the wall, 
to assure me she would not stir. 

" I took my boat, net, and water-cask, as usual ; 
desirous of bringing her home a fresh-fish dinner, 
and succeeded so well as to catch enough for 
several meals and to spare. What remained, I 
salted, and found that she liked that better than 
the fresh, after a few days' salting ; though she did 
not so well approve of that I had formerly pickled 
and dried. 

" Thus we spent the remainder of the winter 
together, till the days began to be light enough 
for me to walk abroad a little in the middle of 
them ; for I was now under no apprehensions 
of her leaving me, as she had before this time many 
opportunities of doing so, but never attempted it. 

" I must here make one reflection upon our con- 
duct which you will almost think incredible, 
namely, that we two, of different sexes, fully in- 
flamed with love to each other, and no outward 
obstacle to prevent our wishes, should have been 
together under the same roof alone for five months, 
conversing together from morning till night (for 
by this she pretty well understood English, and I 
her language), and yet I should never have clasped 
her in my arms, or have shown any farther feel- 
ings to her, than what the deference I all along 
paid her could give her room to surmise. Nay, I 
can affirm that I did not even then know that the 
covering she wore was not the work of art, but 
the work of nature, for I really took it for silk. 
Indeed, the modesty of her carriage and sweetness 
of her behaviour to me, had struck into me such 
a dread of offending her, that though nothing upon 
earth could be more capable of exciting passion 
than her charms, I could have died rather than 
have attempted to salute her only, without actual 
invitation. 

" When the weather cleared up a little, by the 
lengthening of day-light, I took courage one after- 
noon to invite her to walk with me to the lake, 
but she sweetly excused herself from it, whilst 
there was such a glare of light ; but told me, if I 
would not go out of the wood, she would accom- 
pany me ; so we agreed to take a turn only there. 
I first went myself over the stile of the door, and 
taking her in my arms, lifted her over. But even 
when I had her in this manner, I knew not what 
to make of her clothing, it sat so true and close ; 
but I begged she would let me know of what her 
garment was made. She smiled, and asked me if 
mine was not the same under my jacket ? No, 
lady, answered I, I have nothing but skin under 
my clothes. Why, what do you mean ? she 
replied, somewhat tartly ; but indeed I was afraid 
something was the matter, by that nasty covering 
you wear, that you might not be seen. Are not 
you a glumm ? Yes, fair creature. Then, con- 
tinued she, I am afraid you must have been a very 
bad glumm, and have been crashee, which I should 



be very sorry to hear. I replied, I hoped my 
faults had not exceeded other men's ; but I had 
suffered abundance of hardships in my time, and 
that at last Providence having settled me in this 
spot, from whence I had no prospect of ever de- 
parting, it was none of the least of its mercies to 
bring to my knowledge and company the most 
exquisite piece of all his works in her, which I 
should acknowledge as long as I lived. She was 
surprised at this discourse, and said, Have not 
you the same prospect that I or any other person 
has of departing ? You don't do well, and really 
I fear you are slit, or you would not wear this 
nasty cumbersome coat (taking hold of my 
jacket-sleeve), if you were not afraid of showing 
the signs of a bad life upon your natural clothing. 

" I could not for my heart imagine what way 
there was to get out of my dominions ; and as to 
my jacket, I confess she made me blush : and but 
for shame, I would have stripped to my skin to 
have satisfied her. But, madam, said I, pray 
pardon me, for you really are mistaken ; I have 
examined every nook and corner of this island, 
and can find no possible outlet. Why, replied 
she, what outlets do you want ? If you are not 
slit, is not the air open to you as well as other 
people ? I tell you, sir, I fear you have been slit 
for your crimes ; and though you have been so 
good to me that I can't help loving you heartily 
for it, yet, if I thought you had been slit I would 
not stay a moment longer with you, though it 
should break my heart to leave you. 

" I found myself now in a strange quandary, 
longing to know what she meant by being slit. 
But seeing her look a little angrily upon me, I I 
said, Pray, madam, don't be offended, if I take 
the liberty to ask you what you mean by the word 
crashee, so often repeated by you ? for I am an 
utter stranger to what you mean by it. Sir, 
replied she, pray answer me first how you came 
here ? Madam, replied I, if you will please to take 
a walk to the verge of the wood, I will show you 
the very passage. Well, replied she, now this 
odious dazzle of light is lessened, I don't care if I 
do go with you. 

" When we came far enough to see the bridge, 
There, madam, said I, there is my entrance, where 
the sea pours into this lake from yonder cavern ! 
It is not possible, answered she ; this is another 
untruth ; and as I see you would deceive me, and 
are not to be believed, farewell ; I must be gone. 
But hold ! let me ask you one thing more, that is, 
by what means did you come through that cavern ? 
You could not have used to come over the rock ! 
Bless me, madam ! said I, do you think I and my 
boat could fly ? Come over the rock, did you say ? 
No, madam ; I sailed from the great sea, in my 
boat, through that cavern into this very lake. 
What do you mean by your boat ? said she ; you 
seem to make two things of your boat you sailed 
with and yourself. I do so, replied I, for I take 
myself to be good flesh and blood, but my boat is 
made of wood and other materials. Is it so ? 
And pray where is this boat that is made of wood 
and other materials ? under your jacket ? Lord, 
madam ! said I, what ! put a boat under my 
jacket ! No, madam, my boat is in the lake. 
What, more untruths ! said she. No, madam, 
I replied, if you would be satisfied of what I say 
(every word of which is as true as that my boat 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH FEMALES. 



71 



now is in the lake), pray walk with me thither, 
and make your own eyes judges what sincerity I 
speak with. To this she agreed, it growing dusky ; 
hut assured me if I did not give her good satisfac- 
tion, I should see her no more. 

" We arrived at the lake ; and going to my 
wet-dock, Now, madam, pray satisfy yourself 
whether I spoke true or no. She looked at my 
boat, hut could not yet frame a proper notion of 
it, till I stepped into it, and pushing from the shore, 
took the oars in my hand and sailed along the 
lake by her as she walked on the shore. At last 
she seemed so well reconciled to me and my boat, 
that she desired I would take her in. I imme- 
diately did so, and we sailed a good way ; and as 
we returned to my dock I described to her how I 
procured the water we drank, and brought it to 
the shore in that vessel. 

" Well, said she, I have sailed, as you call it, 
many a mile in my life-time, but never in such a 
thing as this. I own it will serve where one has 
a great many things to carry from place to place ; 
but to be labouring thus, when one intends plea- 
sure in sailing, is in my mind most ridiculous. 
Why, pray, madam, how would you have me sail ? 
for getting into the boat only will not carry us this 
way or that, without using some force. But pray 
where did you get this boat, as you call it ? 0, 
madam ! I answered, that is too long a story to 
begin upon now ; but I will make a faithful rela- 
tion of all to you, when we get home. 

" I now perceived, and wondered at it, that the 
later it grew, the more agreeable it seemed to 
her ; * and as I had now brought her into a 
good humour again by seeing and sailing in my 
boat, I was not willing to prevent its increase. 
I told her if she pleased we would land, and when 
I had docked my boat, I would accompany her 
where and as long as she liked. As we talked 
and walked by the lake, she made a little run 
before me, and sprung into it. Perceiving this, 
I cried out ; whereupon she merrily called on me 
to follow her. The light was then so dim, as 
prevented my having more than a confused sight 
of her when she jumped in ; and looking earnestly 
after her, I could discern nothing more than a 
small boat on the water which skimmed along at 
so great a rate that I almost lost sight of it pre- 
sently ; but running along the shore for fear of 
losing her, I met her gravely walking to meet 
me ; and then had entirely lost sight of the boat 
upon the lake. This, accosting me with a smile, 
is my way of sailing, which I perceive by the 
fright you were in, you were altogether unac- 
quainted with ; and as you tell me you came 
from so many thousand miles off, it is possible 
you may be made differently from me ; and I 
suspect from all your discourse, to which 1 have 
been very attentive, it is possible you may no 
more be able to fly, than to sail as I do. No, charm- 
ing creature, that I cannot, I'll assure you. She 
then stepped to the edge of the lake, for the advan- 
tage of a descent before, sprung up into the air, 
and away she went, farther than my eyes could 
follow her. 

" I was quite astonished ; but I had very little 

* Peter subsequently learns that in the regions of the 
Flying People, it is always twilight ; which makes them 
tender-eyed in places where the day is brighter. 



time for reflection ; for in a few minutes after, 
she alighted just by me on her feet. 

" Her return, as she plainly saw, filled me with 
a transport not to be concealed ; and which as 
she afterwards told me was very agreeable to 
her. Indeed I was some moments in such an 
agitation of mind from these unparalleled inci- 
dents, that I was like one thunderstruck ; but 
coming presently to myself, and clasping her in 
my arms with as much love and passion as I was 
capable of expressing, Are you returned again, 
kind angel, said I, to bless a wretch who can only 
be happy in adoring you ! Can it be, that you, 
who have so many advantages over me, should 
quit all the pleasures that nature has formed you 
for, and all your friends and relations, to take an 
asylum in my arms ! But I here make you a 
tender of all I am able to bestow — my love and 
constancy. Come, come, replied she, no more 
raptures ; I find you are a worthier man than I 
thought I had reason to take you for ; and I beg 
your pardon for my distrust, whilst I was ignorant 
of your imperfections ; but now I verily believe 
all you have said is true ; and I promise you, as 
you have seemed so much to delight in me, I will 
never quit you, till death or some other fatal 
accident shall part us. But we will now, if you 
please, go home ; for I know you have been for 
some time uneasy in this gloom, though agreeable 
to me : for, giving my eyes the pleasure of look- 
ing eagerly on you, it conceals my blushes from 
your sight. 

" In this manner, exchanging mutual endear- 
ments and soft speeches, hand in hand we arrived 
at the grotto." 

The author here proceeds to give an account 
of his nuptials, which, though given in the very 
best taste of the time, and evincing great purity 
as well as pleasurability of nature, is better left 
in its place, than brought forward out of the 
circumstances which invest it. 

But are not such of our readers, as did 
not know her before, glad of their new 
acquaintance ? 



XXXIL- 



-ENGLISH AND 
FEMALES. 



FRENCH 



THEIR COSTUMES AND BEARING. 

The writer of the following letter is very 
unmerciful on the ribands, plumes, and other 
enormities of the present mode of dress, and 
having torn these to pieces, proceeds to rend 
away veils and gowns, and fall plumb down 
upon the pretty feet of the wearers, and their 
mode of walking : but when our fair readers 
see what he says of their faces, and call to 
mind how Momus found fault with the steps 
of Venus herself, we trust they will forgive 
his fury for the sake of his love, and consider 
whether so fond an indignation does not con- 
tain something worth their reflection. 



72 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH FEMALES. 



FRENCH LADIES VERSUS ENGLISH. 



Sir, 



To the Editor. 



It is Mrs. Gore, I think, in one of her late 
novels, who says, that ninety-nine English women 
out of a hundred, dress infinitely worse than as 
many French ; but that the hundredth dresses 
with a neatness, elegance, and propriety, which is 
not to he paralleled on the other side of the 
channel. On my relating this to a fair relation of 
of mine, she replied, u Very true, — only I never 
saw that hundredth." — Nor has any one else. 
Without exception, the English women wear the 
prettiest faces and the ugliest dresses of any in 
the known world. A Hottentot hangs her sheep- 
skin caross on her shoulders with more effect, — 
and it is from what I see every day of my life that 
I come to this conclusion. 

I was the other day at a large shop at the west 
end of the town, where, if any where, we may 
expect to meet with favourable specimens of our 
countrywomen. Not a bit of it. There were a 
couple of French ladies there dressed smartly and 
tidily, one in blue and the other in rose-coloured 
silk, with snug little scutty bonnets guiltless of 
tawdry ribbons or dingy plumes ; and great was 
their astonishment at beholding the nondescript 
figures which ever and anon passed by. First 
came gliding out of her carriage, with a languish- 
ing air, a young Miss all ringlets down to the 
knees — feathers drooping on one side of her 
bonnet, flowers on the other, and an immense 
Brussels veil (or some such trash) hanging behind ; 
her gown pinned to her back like rags on a Guy 
Fawkes ; a large warming-pan of a watch, secured 
round her neck by as many chains, gold, silver, and 
pinchbeck, as an Italian brigand ; — with divers 
other articles, as handkerchiefs, boas, &c, which 
however costly and beautiful individually, formed 
all together an unbecoming and cook-maidish 
whole. Then came the two old ladies— but I 
give them up, as too far gone in their evil ways of 
dressing to hope for amelioration. Ditto for the 
widows in their hideous black bonnets, with a foot 
and a half of black crape tacked to each side like 
wings to a paper kite — the horned caps of Edward 
the Confessor are nothing to them. The French 
damsels alluded to above, eyed one or two of 
these machines (they can go by no other name) 
with considerable attention, as if doubting the 
sanity of the wearer. 

" One would not, sure, be frightful when one's dead," 

says Pope's Narcissa. I might address a similar 
question to English widows — 

" One would not, sure, he frightful when one mourns." 
I looked from one end to the other of the 
crowded shop, in hopes of finding some happy 
lady to retrieve the honour of her country — but 
in vain. All wore the same ugly garment more 
akin to a night-shift than a gown ; the same 
warming-pan watch and chains ; the same fly- 
flapping bonnet with bunches of ugly ribands. 
Altogether they formed an awkward contrast 
to the " tight, reg'lar-built French craft," as 
Mathews's Tom Piper calls them. This time, 
however, it was the English who were " rigged 
so rum." 



And then their walk ! Oh quondam Indicator ! 
quondam Tatler ! quondam and present lover of 
all that is good and graceful ! could you not 
" indicate " to our English ladies the way to 
walk ? In what absurd book was it that I read 
the other day that French women walk ill, 
because, from the want of trottoirs in France, they 
get a habit of " picking " with one foot, which 
gave a jerking air to the gait. The aristocratic 
noodle ! whose female relations shuffle about on 
smooth pavements, till they forget how to walk at 
all ! I would not have them cross my grass- 
plat for the world. They would decapitate the 
very daisies. How infinitely superior is the 
Frenchwoman's brisk springy step (albeit caused 
by a most plebeian and un-English want of cause- 
ways), to the languid sauntering gait of most 
English dames ! Nature teaches the one — the 
drill-sergeant can do nothing with the other. I 
wonder how they walked in the days of Charles 
II. Surely Nell Gwynne and my Lady Castle- 
maine walked well — and if they did, they walked 
differently from what they do now. 

I hope that some good creature like the London 
Journalist, who believes in the improveability of 
all things, will take up this subject. A word from 
him would set English ladies upon trying, at 
least, to improve both in dressing and walking. 
There are models enough — look at the French, 
the Spanish, the Italians. They have not better 
opportunities for dressing well than we, and yet 
they beat us hollow. Why can't we have a 
basquina or mantilla , as well as any one else % 
Let us endeavour. 

Above all, let no one suppose that the writer of 
these desultory remarks is in the least deficient in 
love and duty to his fair countrywomen. If he 
offends any of them, they must imagine that it 
has been caused by excess of zeal for their 
interests. Bless their bonnie faces ! if we could 
screw English heads on French figures, what 
women there would be — surely ! 

An Old Crony. 

July 7th, 1834. 

To enter properly into this subject, however 
trifling it may appear (as indeed is the case 
with almost every subject so called), would be 
to open a wide field of investigation into morals, 
laws, climates, &c. Perhaps climate alone, by 
reason of the variety of habits it generates in 
consequence of its various heats, colds, and 
other influences, will ever prevent an entire 
similarity of manners, whatever may be the 
approximation of opinion ; but taking for 
granted, as is not unreasonable, that the pro- 
gress of knowledge and intercourse will not 
be without its effect in bringing the customs 
of civilised countries nearer to one another, 
and that each will be for availing itself of 
what is best and pleasantest amongst its neigh- 
bours, it becomes worth anybody's while to con- 
sider, in what respect it is advisable or other- 
wise to modify the behaviour or manners 
accordingly. We can say little, from personal 
experience, how the case may be in the present 
instance with regard to French manners. We 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH FEMALES. 



73 



have a great opinion of Mrs. Gore, both as a 
general observer, and one that particularly 
understands what is charming in her own sex. 
On the other hand, from books, and from a 
readiness to be pleased with those who wish 
to please, and even from merely having passed 
through France in our way from another 
country, we have got a strong impression, that 
the " hundredth" Frenchwoman, as well as the 
hundredth Englishwoman, nay, the hundredth 
Italian, that is to say, the one that carries the 
requisite graces, the beau ideal, of any country 
to its height, is likely to be so charming a 
person, in dress and everything else, to her 
own countrymen, that what Mrs. Gore says of 
the perfectly dressing Englishwoman, is pre- 
cisely the same thing that would be said of 
the perfectly dressing Frenchwoman by the 
French, and of her Italian counterpart by the 
Italians. It is impossible, unless we are 
half-foreigners, or unless our own nation is 
altogether of an inferior grade (and then per- 
haps our prejudices and irritation would render 
it equally so) to get rid of some one point of 
national preference in forming judgments of 
this kind. Our friend the Old Crony, we see, 
for all his connoisseurship and crony-ism, his 
regard for a certain piquancy of perfection in 
the French dress and walk, and his wish that 
his fair countrywomen would " take steps" 
after their fashion, cannot get rid of the pre- 
ference in which he was brought up for the 
beauty of the English countenance. We have 
a similar feeling in favour even of a certain 
subjected manner, a bending gentleness, (how 
shall we term it ?) in the bearing of the 
sweetest of our countrywomen, not exactly 
connected with decision of step, nor perhaps 
with variety of harmony : for all pleasures 
run into one another, if they are of a right 
sort, and the ground of them true. Look at 
the paintings of the French, and you will find, 
in like manner, that their ideal of a face, let 
them try to universalise it as they can, is a 
French one ; and so it is with the Spanish 
and Italian paintings, and with the Greek 
statues. The merry African girls shriek with 
horror when they first look upon a white 
traveller. Their notion of a beautiful com- 
plexion is a skin shining like Warren's 
blacking. 

It is proper to understand, in any question, 
great or small, the premises from which we 
set out, the point which is required. In the 
dress and walk of females, as in all other 
matters in which they are concerned, the 
point of perfection, we conceive, is that which 
shall give us the best possible idea of perfect 
womanhood. We are not to consider the dress 
by itself, nor the walk by itself, but as the 
dress and the walk of the best and pleasantest 
woman, and how far therefore it does her 
justice. This produces the consideration of 
what we look upon as a perfect female ; 



people will vary in their opinions on this 
head ; and hence even so easy a looking 
question as the one before us, becomes in- 
vested with difficulties. The opinion will 
depend greatly on the temperament as well 
as the understanding of the judge. Our cor- 
respondent, for instance, is evidently a lively 
fellow, old or young, and given a good deal 
rather to the material than to the spiritual ; 
and hence his notion of perfection tends 
towards a union of the trim and the lively, 
the impulsive, and yet withal to the self-pos- 
sessed. He is one, we conceive, who would 
" have no nonsense," as the phrase is, in his 
opinion of the possible or desirable ; and who 
is in no danger of the perils, either of senti- 
mentality or sentiment ; either of an affected 
refinement of feeling or any very serious 
demand of any sort. He is not for bringing 
into the walks of publicity, male or female, 
the notions of sequestered imaginations, nor 
to have women glancing and bashful like 
fawns. He is for having all things tight and 
convenient as a dressing-case ; " neat as im- 
ported ;" polished, piquant, well packed, and 
with no more flowers upon it than serve to 
give a hint of the smart pungency within, 
like a bottle of attar of roses, or fleur-d'epine. 
We do not quarrel with him. Chacun a son 
gout. Every man to his taste. Nay, his taste 
is our own, as far as concerns the improvement 
of female manners in ordinary. We do think 
that the general style of female English dress- 
ing and walking would be benefited by an 
inoculation of that which we conceive him to 
recommend. We have no predilection in 
favour of shuffling, and shouldering, and loung- 
ing, of a mere moving onwards of the feet, and 
an absence of all grace and self-possession. 
We can easily believe, that the French women 
surpass the English in this respect, because 
their climate is livelier, and themselves better 
taught and respected. People may start at 
that last word, but there is no doubt that the 
general run of French females are better 
taught, and therefore more respected, than the 
same number of English. They read more, 
they converse more, they are on more equal 
terms with the other sex (as they ought to be,) 
and hence the other sex have more value for 
their opinions, ay, and for their persons ; for 
the more sensible a woman is, supposing her 
not to be masculine, the more attractive she 
is, in her proportionate power to entertain. 
But whether it is that we are English, or 
fonder of poetry in its higher sense than of 
vers de societe or the poetry of polite life, we 
cannot help feeling a prejudice in favour of 
Mrs. Gore's notion about the "hundredth" 
Englishwoman ; though perhaps the " hun- 
dredth" Frenchwoman, if we could see her, or 
the hundredth Italian or Spanish woman, 
would surpass all others, by dint of com- 
bining the sort of private manner which we 



74 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH FEMALES. 



have in our eye, with some exquisite implica- 
tion of a fitness for general intercourse, which 
we have never yet met with. 

Meantime, we repeat, that we give up to 
our correspondent's vituperations the gait of 
English females in general, and their dress 
also ; though it is a little hard in him to 
praise the smallness of the French bonnet at 
the expense of the largeness of the English, 
when it is recollected that the latter are copied 
from France, and that our fair countrywomen 
were ridiculed on their first visit there after 
the war, for the very reverse appearance. 
But it is to the spirit of our mode of dressing 
and walking that we object ; and both are 
unfit either for the private or public " walk " 
of life, because both are alike untaught and 
unpleasing, — alike indicative of minds not 
properly cultivated, and of habitual feelings 
that do not care to be agreeable. The walk 
is a saunter or shuffle, and the dress a lump. 
Or if not a lump throughout, it is a lump at 
both ends, with a horrible pinch in the middle. 
A tight-laced Englishwoman is thus, from head 
to foot, a most painful sight ; her best notion 
of being charming is confined to three inches 
of ill-used ribs and liver ; while her head is 
either grossly ignorant of the harm she is 
doing herself, or her heart more deplorably 
careless of the consequences to her offspring. 

Are we of opinion then, that the dress and 
walk of Englishwomen would be bettered, 
generally speaking, by taking the advice of 
our correspondent ? Most certainly we are ; 
and for this reason ; that there is some sense 
of grace, at all events, in the attire and bear- 
ing of the females of the Continent ; some 
evidence of mind, and some testimony to the 
proper claims of the person ; whereas, the 
only idea in the heads of the majority with us 
is that of being in fashion merely because it 
is the fashion, or of dressing in a manner to 
show how much they can afford. This is 
partly owing, no doubt, to our being a com- 
mercial people, and also to the struggles which 
everybody has been making for the last forty 
years to seem richer than they are, some for 
the sake of concealing how they have decreased 
in means, and others to show how they have 
risen ; but a nation may be commercial, and 
yet have a true taste. The Florentines had 
it, when they were at once the leaders of 
trade and of the fine arts, in the time of 
Lorenzo de Medici. It is to our fine arts and 
our increasing knowledge that we ourselves 
must look to improvement even in dress, in 
default of being impelled to it by greater live- 
liness of spirit, or a more convenient climate. 
We shall then learn to oppose even the climate 
better, and to furnish it with the grace and 
colour which it wants. In France, the better 
temperature of the atmosphere, as well as 
intellectual and moral causes, impels people 
to a livelier and happier way of walking. 



They have no reason to look as if they were 
uncomfortable. In the south of Europe, 
where everything respires animal sensibility, 
and love and music divide the time with busi- 
ness, the most unaffected people acquire an 
apparent consciousness and spring in the gait, 
which in England would be thought ostenta- 
tious. It gave no such idea to the severe and 
simple Dante, when (in the poetical spirit of 
the image, and not of course in the letter,) he 
praised his mistress for moving along like " a 
peacock," and a " crane." 

Soave a guisa va di un bel pavone, 
Diritta sopra se come una grue. 

Sweetly she goes, like the bright peacock ; strait 
Above herself, like to the lady crane. 

Petrarch, speaking of Laura, does not venture 
upon these primeval images ; but still he 
shows how much he thought of the beauty 
of a woman's steps ! Laura too was a French- 
woman, not an Italian, and probably had a 
different kind of walk. Petrarch expresses 
the moral graces of it. 

Non era 1' andar suo cosa mortale, 
Ma d' angelica forma. 

Her walk was like no mortal thing, but shaped 
After an angel's. 

In English poetry the lover speaks with the 
usual enthusiasm of his mistress's eyes and 
lips, &c, but he scarcely ever mentions her 
walk. The fact is remarkable, and the reason 
too obvious. The walk is not worth mention. 
Italian and (we believe) Spanish poetry abound 
with the reverse. Milton, deeply imbued with 
the Italian, as well as with his own perceptions 
of beauty as a great poet, did not forget, in his 
description of Eve, to say, that 

Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye, 
In every gesture dignity and love. 

This moving and gesticulating beauty was 
not English ; at least she is not the English- 
woman of our days. Mrs. Hutchinson perhaps 
might have been such a woman ; or the ladies 
of the Bridgewater family, for whom he wrote 
his Comus. In Virgil, JEneas is not aware 
that his mother Venus has been speaking with 
him in the guise of a wood-nymph, till she 
begins to move away: the "divinity" then 
became apparent. 

Et vera incessu patuit dea, 

And by her walk the Queen of Love is known, 

Dryden. 

The women of Spain, and Spanish America, 
are celebrated throughout the world for the 
elegance of their walking, and for the way in 
which they carry their veil or mantilla, as 
alluded to by our correspondent. Knowing it 
only from books, we cannot say precisely in 
what the beauty of their walk consists ; but 
we take it to be something between stateliness 



ENGLISH MALE COSTUME. 



75 



and vivacity, — between a consciousness of 
being admired, and that grace which is natu- 
ral to any human being who is well made, 
till art or diffidence spoils it. It is the per- 
fection, we doubt not, of animal elegance. 
We have an English doubt, whether we 
should not require an addition or modification 
of something, not indeed diffident, but perhaps 
not quite so confident, — something which to 
the perfection of animal elegance, should add 
that of intellectual and moral refinement, and 
a security from the chances of coarseness and 
violence. But all these are matters of breed- 
ing and bringing up, — ay, of " birth, parent- 
age, and education," and we should be grate- 
ful when we can get any one of them. Better 
have even a good walk than nothing, for there 
is some refinement in it, and moral refine- 
ment too, though we may not always think 
the epithet very applicable to the possessor. 
Good walking and good dressing, truly so 
called, are alike valuable, only inasmuch as 
they afford some external evidence, however 
slight, of a disposition to orderliness and 
harmony in the mind within, — of shapeliness 
and grace in the habitual movements of the 
soul. 



XXXIII.-ENGLISH MALE COSTUME.— 

SUGGESTED BY MB. PLANCHE'S BOOK ON COSTUME. 

Mr. Planche's book, besides being sensibly 
and amusingly written, in a clear, unaffected 
style, contains more than would be expected 
from its title. It narrates the military as well 
as civil history of British costume, giving us 
not only the softer vicissitudes of silks and 
satins, but ringing the changes of helms, 
hauberks, and swords, from the earliest period 
of the use of armour till the latest ; and it will 
set the public right, for the first time, upon 
some hitherto mistaken points of character 
and manners. We have been surprised, for 
instance, to learn, that our " naked ancestors," 
(as we supposed them), the ancient Britons, 
were naked only when they went to battle ; 
and it turns out, that Richard the Third, 
instead of being one who thought himself 

" Not made to court an amorous looking-glass."— 

was a dandy in his dress, and as particular 
about his wardrobe and coronation-gear as 
George the Fourth. This trait in his charac- 
ter is confirmative, we think, of the traditions 
respecting his deformity — men who are under 
that disadvantage being remarkable either for 
a certain nicety and superiority of taste, moral 
and personal, if their dispositions are good, or 
for all sorts of mistakes the other way, under 
the reverse predicament. Two persons of the 
greatest natural refinement we ever met with, 
have had a crook in the shoulder. Richard was 



a usurper, a man of craft and violence ; and his 
jealousy of the respect of his fellow-men took 
the unhappier and more glaring turn. He 
thought to overcome them with his fine 
clothes and colours, as he had done with his 
tyranny. Richard partook, it seems, of the 
effeminate voluptuousness of his brother 
Edward the Fourth, as Edward partook of 
Richard's cruelty. 

Mr. Planche is of opinion, that " the most 
elegant and picturesque costume ever worn in 
England," was that of the reign of Charles the 
First, commonly called the Vandyke dress, 
from its frequency in the portraits of that 
artist. The dresses of few periods, we think, 
surpass those of the Anglo-Saxon times, and 
of some of the Norman. (See the engrav- 
ings in the book at pages 22, 103, 121, and 
127.) Some of the Anglo-Saxon ladies were 
dressed with almost as elegant a simplicity 
as the Greeks. But whatever Mr. Planche 
may think of the extreme gallantry and pic- 
turesqueness of the Vandyke dress, with its 
large hat and feathers, its cloak and rapier, 
and its long breeches meeting the tops of the 
wide boots', its superiority may surely be at 
least contested by the jewelled and plumed 
caps, the long locks, the vests, mantles, and 
hose of the reign of Henry the Seventh ; espe- 
cially if we recollect that they had the broad 
hats and feathers too, when they chose to wear 
them, and that they had not the " peaked " 
beard, nor a steeple crown to the hat. (See 
the figures at pages 220 and 222 ; and imagine 
them put into as gallant bearing, as those in 
the pictures of Vandyke. See also the portrait 
of Henry himself, at the beginning of the 
volume ; and the cap, cloak, and vest of the 
Earl of Surrey, the poet, in the Holbein portrait 
of him in Lodge's Illustrations.) 

It is a curious fact, that good taste in costume 
has by no means been in proportion to an age's 
refinement in other respects. Mere utility is 
a better teacher than mere will and power ; 
and fashions in dress have generally been 
regulated by those who had power, and 
nothing else. Shakspeare's age was that of 
ruffs and puffs ; Pope's that of the most 
execrable of all coats, cocked hats, and waist- 
coats ; lumpish, formal, and useless ; a miser- 
able affectation of ease with the most ridiculous 
buckram. And yet the costume of part of 
George the Third's reign was perhaps worse, 
for it had not even the garnish ; it was the 
extreme of mechanical dulness ; and the 
women had preposterous tresses of curls and 
pomatum on their head, by way of setting off 
the extremity of dull plainness with that of 
dull caprice. For the hoop, possibly, some- 
thing may be said, not as a dress, not as an 
investment, but as an inclosure. It did not 
seem so much to disfigure, as to contain, the 
wearer,--to be not a dress, but a gliding shell. 
The dancers at Otaheite, in the pictures to 



76 



ENGLISH MALE COSTUME. 



Captain Cook's voyages, have some such 
Lower Houses ; and look well in them for the 
same reason. The body issued from the hoop, 
as out of a sea of flounce and furbelow. It 
was the next thing to a nymph half hidden 
in water. The arm and fan reposed upon it, 
as upon a cloud or a moving sphere, the fair 
angel looking serene and superior above it. 
Thus much we would say in defence of the 
hoop, properly so called, when it was in its 
perfection, large and circular, and to be 
approached like a " hedge of divinity," or the 
; walls of Troy, — 

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious petticoat ; 

not for those mashed and minor shapes of the 
phenomenon, which degenerated into mere 
appendages, panniers, or side lumps, and 
reminded you of nothing but their deformity. 
But it was always a thing fantastic, and fit 
only for court and ceremony. 

Mr. Planche justly cautions one generation 
against laughing at the fashions of another. 
He advises such ladies as would " scream " 
at the dresses of the fourteenth or even 
eighteenth century, to look into a fashionable 
pocket-book or magazine for the year 1815 or 
20, and then candidly compare notes. Appen- 
dages or inclosures are one thing ; positive 
clinging disfigurements another. The ugliest 
female dress, in our opinion, without exception, 
was that which we conceive Mr. Planche to 
allude to, and which confounded all ages and 
shapes by girdling the gown under the arm- 
pits, and sticking a little pad at the back, 
almost between the shoulders ! It reduced 
all figures to lumps of absurdity. No well- 
shaped woman, we may be sure, invented it. 
A history of the real origin of many fashions 
would be a curious document. We should 
find infirmity and unsightliness cheating youth 
and beauty into an imitation of them, and 
beaux and belles piquing themselves on re- 
sembling the worst points about their cunning 
elders. 

As long as a man wears the modern coat, he 
has no right to despise any dress. What a 
thing it is, though so often taken for some- 
thing " exquisite ! " What a horse-collar for 
a collar ! What snips at the collar and 
lapells ! What a mechanical and ridiculous 
cut about the flaps ! What buttons in front 
that are never meant to button, and yet are 
no ornament ! And what an exquisitely 
absurd pair of buttons at the back ! gravely 
regarded nevertheless, and thought as indis- 
pensably necessary to every well-conditioned 
coat, as other bits of metal or bone are to the 
bodies of savages whom we laugh at. There 
is absolutely not one iota of sense, grace, or 
even economy, in the modern coat. It is an 
article as costly as it is ugly, and as ugly as it 
is useless. In winter it is not enough, and in 
hot weather it is too much. It is the tailors' 



remnant and cabbaging of the coats formerly 
in use, and deserves only to be chucked back 
to them as an imposition in the bill. It is the 
old or frock coat cut away in front and at the 
sides, mounted with a horse-collar, and left 
with a ridiculous tail. The waistcoat or vest, 
elongated, and with the addition of sleeves, 
might supersede it at once, and be quite suf- 
ficient in warm weather. A vest reaching to 
the mid-thigh is a graceful and reasonable 
habit, and with the addition of a scarf or sash, 
would make as handsome, or even brilliant a 
one, as anybody could desire. In winter- 
time, the same cloaks would do for it, as are 
used now ; and there might be lighter cloaks 
for summer. But the coat, as it now exists, 
is a mere nuisance and expense, and disgraces 
every other part of the dress, except the neck- 
cloth. Even the hat is too good for it ; for 
a hat is good for something, though there is 
more chimney-top than beauty in it. It 
furnishes shade to the eyes, and has not 
always an ill look, if well-proportioned. The 
coat is a sheer piece of mechanical ugliness. 
The frock-coat is another matter, except as to 
the collar, which, in its present rolled or 
bolstered shape, is always ugly. As to the 
great-coat, it makes a man look either like a 
man in a sack, or a shorn bear. It is cloth 
upon cloth, clumsiness made clumsier, some- 
times thrice over, — cloth waistcoat, cloth coat, 
cloth great-coat, — a " three-piled hyperbole." 
It is only proper for travellers, coachmen, and 
others who require to have no drapery in the 
way. A cloak is the only handsome over-all. 

The neck-cloth is worthy of the coat. What 
a heaping of monstrosity on monstrosity ! The 
woollen horse collar is bad enough ; yet, as 
if this were not sufficient, a linen one must be 
superadded. Men must look as if they were 
twice seized with symbols of apoplexy. — the 
horse-collar to shorten the neck, and the linen- 
collar to squeeze it. Some man with a des- 
perately bad throat must have invented the 
neck-cloth, especially as it had a padding, or 
pudding in it, when it first came up. His neck 
could not have been fit to be seen. It must 
have been like a pole, or a withered stalk ; or 
else he was some faded fat dandy, ashamed of 
his double chin. There can be no objection 
to people's looking as well as they can contrive, 
young or old ; but it is a little too much to set 
a fashion, which besides being deformed, is 
injurious. The man was excusable, because 
he knew no better ; but it is no wonder if 
painters, and poets, and young Germans, and 
other romantic personages, have attempted to 
throw off the nuisance, especially such as have 
lived in the south. The neck-cloth is ugly, is 
useless, is dangerous to some, and begets effe- 
minate fear of colds with all. The English, 
in consequence of their living more in-doors 
than they used, fancy they have too many rea- 
sons for muffling themselves up,— not aware 



ENGLISH WOMEN VINDICATED. 



77 



that the more they do so, the more they 
subject themselves to what they dread ; and 
that it is by a general sense of warmth in the 
person they are to be made comfortable and 
secure, and not by filling up every creek and 
cranny of their dress to the very chin. 

But some may tell us they cannot feel that 
general warmth, without thus muffling them- 
selves up. True, if they accustom themselves 
to it ; but it is the custom itself which is in 
fault. They can have the warmth without it, if 
they please ; just as well as they can without 
muffling up their eyes. " How can you go 
with your body naked ? " said a not very wise 
person to an Indian. " How can you go with 
your face naked ? " said the Indian. " I am 
used to it,". replied the man. " Well, and I am 
used to the other," rejoined the Indian ; "lam 
all faceV Now it will not exactly do to be " all 
face,"" in a civilised country ; the police would 
object ;— Piccadilly is not Paradise. But then 
it is not necessary to be all muffle. 

The ladies in the reign of Edward I. once 
took to wearing a cloth round their throats 
and ears, in a way which made a poet exclaim, 
" Par Dieu ! I have often thought in my heart, 
when I have seen a lady so closely tied up, 
that her neck-cloth was nailed to her chin." 
There is a figure of her in Mr. Planche's book, 
p. 115. Now this was the precise appearance 
of a neck-cloth some years back, when it was 
worn with a pad or stiffener, and the point of 
the chin reposed in it : nay, it is so at present, 
with many. The stock looks even more stiff 
and apoplectic, especially if there is a red face 
above it. When dandies faint, the neck-cloth 
is always the first thing loosed, as the stays 
are with a lady. 

By the way, the dandies wear stays too ! 
We have some regard for these gentlemen, 
because they have reckoned great names 
among them in times of old, and have some 
very clever and amiable ones now, and manly 
withal too. They may err, we grant, from an 
excess of sympathy with what is admired, as 
well as from mere folly or effeminacy. But 
whatever approximates a man's shape to a 
woman's is a deformity. We have seen some 
of them with hips, upon which they should 
have gone carrying pails, and cried " milk ! " 
And who was it that clapped those monstrous 
protuberances upon the bosoms of our brave 
life-guards ? No masculine dandy we may be 
sure. A man's breast should look as if it 
would take a hundred blows upon it, like a 
glorious anvil ; and not be deformed with a 
frightened wadding ; still less resemble the 
bosom that tenderness peculiarly encircles, 
and that is so beautiful because it is so dif- 
ferent from his own. 



XXXIV.— ENGLISH WOMEN VINDI- 
CATED. 

Slender, complaining of the masquerade 
trick that had been put on him at the close of 
the comedy, says that he had " married Anne 
Page" and " she was a great lubberly boy." 
Far better were a surprise of the reverse order, 
which should betray itself in some tone of voice, 
or sentiment, or other unlooked for emanation 
of womanhood, while we were thinking our- 
selves quietly receiving the visit of lubberly 
himself, or rather some ingenious cousin of his; 
and of some such pleasure we have had a taste, 
if not in the shape of any Viola, or Julia, or other 
such flattering palpability, yet in that of a fair 
invisible ; for we recollect well our Indicator 
friend " Old Boy," who sends us the follow- 
ing letter ; but what if we have discovered 
meanwhile that "Old Boy" is no boy at all, nor 
man neither, but a pretty woman, and one that 
we think this a pretty occasion for unmasking ; 
since in the hearts of the male sex, English 
women will find defenders enough ; but few of 
themselves have the courage to come forward. 
Even our would-be "Old Boy" cannot do it but 
in disguise ; which though a thing very well for 
her to assume, it is no less becoming in us, we 
think, on such an occasion, to take off, seeing 
that it gives the right touching effect to that 
pretty petulance in her letter, and that half- 
laughing tone of ill-treatment, which somehow 
has such a feminine breath in it, and must 
double the wish to be on her side. 

Wonderful is the effect produced in a letter 
by the tone in which we read it or suppose it 
written, and by the knowledge of its being 
male or female. The one before us would be a 
good "defiance" to Old Crony, were its signa- 
ture true ; but to know that it is written by 
a woman, gives it a new interest, c and quite 
another sort of music. Cannot we see the face 
glow, and the dimples playing with a frown ; 
and hear the light, breathing voice bespeaking 
the question in its favour ? Does it not make 
" Old Crony" himself glad to be " defied to the 
uttermost V 

To the Editor. 

Dear old Friend with a new face, 
Your correspondent "Old Crony," seems as 
deficient in temper as in judgment, in his brusque 
remarks upon the dress and gait of our fair coun- 
trywomen ; nor can it be allowed him that he 
has chosen the best place to study the finest spe- 
cimens of English women, either as regards re- 
finement in dress or bearing. The women who 
most frequent bazaars and fashionable drapers' 
are generally the most vacant-minded and petty 
creatures in existence ; who wander from one 
lounge to another, seeking to dispel the ennui 
which torments them, by any frivolous kill-time. 
I really loathe the sight of such places, and think 



78 



ENGLISH WOMEN VINDICATED. 



they have done much mischief among the idle and 
ignorant part of my countrywomen. But to return 
to the subject, I maintain, in opposition to " Old 
Crony," that in no other country can we see as- 
sembled together so much beauty and grace, good 
dressing and elegance of carriage, as in our fashion- 
able promenades, our brilliant assemblies, and 
still more in those delightful home parties, where 
sprightliness and intelligence combine to give 
grace and fascination : — nothing parallel, I am 
sure, is to be found in the celebrated Longchamps, 
or the gardens of the Tuileries at Paris, or in the 
Graben at Vienna, or "under the Lindens" of 
Berlin, or in any of the numerous public gardens 
on the Continent, wherever I have been ; and I 
call upon all my brother and sister tourists to bear 
testimony with me on this mighty question ; and 
furthermore, like a good and faithful champion in 
the cause of the fair dames and damsels of Old 
England, I do defy "Old Crony" to the uttermost, 
more especially for his inhuman wish of screwing 
English faces on to French figures, which would 
be a fearful "dove-tailing" of lovely faces upon 
parchment skeletons ; seeing, that the generality 
of French females are terribly deficient in that 
plumpness and roundness, which are usually con- 
sidered desirable in womanhood. 

I agree with you, dear Ci-devant Indicator, 
that French women are generally more respected, 
and are on more equal terms with the male sex than 
our countrywomen ; but I must differ as to their 
reading more, or being better informed. It is true 
that in society they will bear their part well in 
general or political conversation ; but when alone 
with a Frenchwoman, she would be grievously 
offended if you chose any other subject than her 
own personal attractions, and did not conclude by 
making a tender " declaration.' 1 '' These are the 
eternal themes by which alone you can please the 
young and the old, the ugly and the pretty ; and 
of this truth many will assure you, besides your 
old friend, admirer, and correspondent, 



July the 23rd. 



Old Boy. 



P.S In defending the dress of my country- 
women, I except the poorer and working orders. 
Every other nation has a peculiar and picturesque 
costume for theirs ; ours is remarkable only for 
its sluttish, draggle-tailed appearance, at least in 
London : in country-places the peasant's dress is 
comfortable, if not very piquant. 

"We suspect that, in this as in most contro- 
versies, there is less real difference of opinion 
between the fair and unfair parties, than might 
be thought. Our fair correspondent gives up 
the bazaar and shop-hunting people, and those 
too, whose dresses are of the "poorer sort ;'' and 
betwixt these classes, or rather including them, 
are to be found, we conceive, all the dresses and 
the walks, to which Old Crony would find 
himself objecting. The residue might prove 
its claims to a participation in the general 
refinement of Europe, without giving up a 
certain colouring of manners, as natural to it 
as the colour to its sky. And as to what is 
" delightful " and " fascinating," do not all 
people make that for themselves, more or less, 



out of the amount of their own sympathy and 
imagination ? and does not each nation, as we 
said before, think the elite of its own charmers 
the most charming? No parties are so delight- 
ful to our fair correspondent, as those in her 
own country. Is not this precisely w 7 hat would 
be said by a cordial Frenchwoman, of French 
parties ; by an Italian, of Italian ; and so on ? 
Custom itself is a good thing, if it is an inno- 
cent one. We feel easy in it as in a form and 
mould to which we have grown ; but when, in 
addition to this easiness, we think of all the 
feelings with which we have coloured it, all 
the pleasure we have given and received, all 
our joys, sorrows, friendships, loves, and reli- 
gions, we may conceive how difficult it is to 
give up the smallest and most superficial 
forms in which they appear, or to learn how 
to admit the superiority of anything which is 
foreign to them. 

Brusque attacks — sharp and loud outcries — 
may sometimes be desirable in order to beget 
notice to a question ; but undoubtedly, the way 
to persuade is to approve as much as one can ; 
to maintain, by loving means, a loving atten- 
tion. If we do not, we run a chance, instead 
of mending the mistakes of other people, of 
having our own cast in our teeth. See for 
instance what Old Crony has done for himself 
and his fair Frenchwomen with our correspon- 
dent, who does not deny perhaps that the 
French " middle classes " walk better " gene- 
rally" speaking, than the English — at least 
we find this no where surely stated or implied — 
but she avails herself of his error in using the 
w r ord " figures " instead of " carriage," to taunt 
him with the want of plumpness and womanhood 
in the composition of his favourites, and accuse 
the universal French feminity of being "parch- 
ment skeletons!" Here is the comparative 
French thinness, and want of red and white, 
made the very worst of, because its panegyrist 
made the worst of the appearance of the other 
parties. For as to his compliment to their 
handsome faces, this, it seems, is not enough 
in these intellectual days : 

" Mind, mind alone, (bear witness earth and heaven !) 
The living fountain in itself contains 
Of beauteous and sublime ! 

There must be soul from head to foot — 
evidence of thorough gracefulness and under- 
standing ; otherwise the ladies will have none 
of his good word. Well : here is the principle 
admitted on both sides. Let those who wish 
to see it thoroughly in action, set lovingly 
about the task. The loving will soonest per- 
suade, and soonest become perfect. Had old 
Crony, instead of expressing his "inhuman wish 
of screwing English faces on to French figures," 
observed, that the latter are better in spirit than 
in substance, and shown his anxiety to consult 
the feelings and enumerate the merits of 
his countrywomen, we suspect that nobody 



SUNDAY IN LONDON. 



70 



would have been readier than his fair antagonist 
to do justice to what is attractive in her French 
sisterhood. 

That there are, and have always been, num- 
bers of beautiful women in France as well as 
in England, and beautiful in figure too, and 
plump withal, no Antigallican, the most pious 
that ever existed, could take upon him to deny; 
though the praise conveyed by their word 
embonpoint (in good case), which means " fleshy 
and fattish," (as the poet has it), would imply, 
that the beauty is not apt to be of that order. 
The country of Diana de Poitiers, of Agnes 
Sorel, and of all the charmers of the reigns of 
Valois and the Bourbons, is not likely to lose 
its reputation in a hurry for " bevies of bright 
dames." Charming they were, that is cer- 
tain, whether plump or not ; at least in the 
the eyes of the princes and wits that admired 
them ; and French admiration must go for 
something, and have at least a geographical 
voice in the world, whatever Germany or 
Goethe himself may think of the matter. On 
the other hand, far are we from abusing all or 
any of the dear plump Germans who have 
had graceful and loving souls, whether fifteen, 
like poor Margaret, or "fat, fair, and forty," 
like Madame Schroeder-Devrient. We have 
been in love with them time out of mind, in 
the novels of the good village pastor, the 
reverend and most amatory Augustus La Fon- 
taine. The Peninsular and South American 
ladies, albeit beautiful walkers, and well- 
grounded in shape, are understood not to 
abound in plump figures ; yet who shall doubt 
the abundance of their fascinations, that has 
read what Cervantes and Camoens have said 
of them, and what is said of their eyes and 
gait, by all enamoured travellers? Is not 
Dorothea for ever sitting by the brook-side, 
beautiful, and bathing her feet, in the pages 
of the immortal Spaniard ? And was not Inez 
de Castro taken out of the tomb, in order to 
have her very coffin crowned with a diadem ; 
so triumphant was the memory of her love 
and beauty over death itself ? Italian beauties 
are almost another word for Italian paintings, 
and for the muses of Ariosto and of song. 
And yet, admiring all these as we do, are we 
for that reason traitors to the beauties of our 
own country? or do we not rather the more 
admire the charmers that are nearest to us, 
and that perpetuate the train of living images 
of grace and affection which runs through 
the whole existence of any loving observer, 
like a frieze across the temple of a cheerful 
religion ? 

And yet all this does not hinder us from 
wishing that the generality of our country- 
women walked better and dressed better, and 
even looked a little less reserved and mis- 
giving. A Frenchman is not bound to wish 
the generality of his countrywomen plumper, 
because he admires them for other beauties, 



or sees plumpness enough in his friends. A 
Spaniard may reasonably wish his a little more 
red and white, if it be only for the sake of 
their health; and if a jovial table-loving 
Viennese desired, after all, a little less plump- 
ness in his adorable for the same reason (and 
in himself too), we should not quarrel with 
his theory, however it might object to his 
practice. 

The handsomest female we ever beheld was 
at Turin; she was a maid-servant crossing a 
square. The most ladylike-looking female in 
humble life was a French girl, the daughter of a 
small innkeeper. "We heard one of her humble 
admirers speak of her as having the air 
d'une petite duchesse (of a little duchess). But the 
most charming face that ever furnished us with 
a vision for life, (and we have seen many) was 
one that suddenly turned round in a concert- 
room in England, — an English girl's, radiant 
with truth and goodness. All expressions of 
that kind make us love them, and here was the 
height of material charmingness added. And 
we thought the figure equal to the face. We 
know not whether we could have loved it for 
ever, as some faces can be loved without 
being so perfect. Habit and loving-kindness, 
and the knowledge of the heart and soul, 
could alone determine that. But if not, it was 
the divinest imposition we ever met with. 



XXXV.— SUNDAY IN LONDON. No. I. 

It is astonishing what a deal of good stuff, 
of some sort or another, inherent or associated, 
there is in every possible thing that can be 
talked of ; and how it will look forth out of 
the dullest windows of common-place, if sym- 
pathy do but knock at the door. 

There is that house for instance, this very 
Sunday, No. 4, Bally croft-row, in the Smithy ; 
did you ever see such a house, so dull, so 
drearily insipid, so very rainy -bad -Sunday 
like ? old, yet not so old as to be venerable ; 
poor, yet not enough so to be pitied ; the 
bricks black ; the place no thoroughfare ; no 
chance of a hackney-coach going by ; the 
maid-servant has just left the window, yawn- 
ing. But now, see who is turning the cor- 
ner, and comes up the row. Some eminent 
man, perhaps ? Not he. He is eminent for 
nothing, except, among his fellow-apprentices, 
for being the best hand among them at turn- 
ing a button. But look how he eyes, all the 
way, the house we have been speaking of — 
see how he bounds up the steps — with what a 
face, now cast down the area, and now raised 
to the upper windows, he gives his humble yet 
impressive knock — and lo ! now look at the 
maid-servant's face, as she darts her head out 
of the window, and instantly draws it back 
again, radiant with delight. It is Tom Hicks, 



80 



SUNDAY IN LONDON. 



who lias come up from Birmingham a week 
before she expected him. The door is opened 
almost as soon as the face is seen ; and now is 
there love and joy in that house, and conse- 
quently a grace in the street ; and it looks quite 
a different place, at least in the eyes of the 
loving and the wise. 

This is our secret for making the dullest 
street in the metropolis, nay the squalidest and 
worst, put forth some flower of pleasantness 
(for the seeds of good find strange corners to 
grow in, could people but cultivate them) : and 
if our secret is not productive to everybody, 
it is no fault of ours : nay, for that matter, it 
is none of theirs ; but we pity them, and have 
reason to think ourselves richer. We hap- 
pened to be walking through some such forlorn- 
looking street with the late Mr. Hazlitt, when 
we told him we had a charm against the melan- 
choly of such places ; and on his asking what 
it was, and being informed, he acknowledged, 
with a look between pleasure and sorrow, that 
it was a true one. The secret came home to 
him ; but he could have understood, though he 
had not felt it. Fancy two lovers, living in the 
same street, either of whom thinks it a delight to 
exist in the same spot,and is happy for the morn- 
ing if one look is given through the window- 
pane. It puts your thoughts in possession of 
the highest and most celestial pleasure on earth. 
No " milk-white thorn that scents the evening 
gale " is necessary to it, though it is a very 
fitting accompaniment. The dullest street, 
the dullest room upon earth, is sufficient, and 
becomes a spot radiant beyond the dreams of 
princes. Think of George the Fourth in the 
midst of all the splendour of Windsor Castle, 
and then of this poor maid-servant, with her 
health, her youth, and her love, looking in the 
eyes of the man she is fond of, and hardly able 
to speak for gratitude and joy. We grant 
that there is no comparison, in one sense, 
between the two individuals, — the poor old 
King, with his efforts at being fine and happy, 
and the poor young girl, with her black 
worsted stockings and leaping bosom, as happy 
as her heart can make her. But the contrast 
may serve to remind us that we may attribute 
happiness wrongly in fine places, and miss it 
erroneously in common ones. Windsor Castle 
is sufficient beauty to itself, and has poetical 
memories ; but in the commonest street we see 
there may be the richest real joy*. 

Love is not peculiar to London on Sundays : 
they have it even in Edinburgh, notwithstand- 
ing what a fair charmer in l Tait's Magazine ' 
tells us, with such a staid countenance, of the 
beatitudes of self-reflection into which her 
countrymen retire on that day. Otherwise, 
out of love alone, we might render our dull- 

* There is now, thank God, love, as well as splendour, 
in Windsor Castle. One may fancy the graces of Mr. 
Keats's « Eve of St. Agnes," realised there, without the 
troubles of it. 



looking metropolitan Sabbath the brightest 
day in the week. And so it is, and in Edin- 
burgh too, and all the Sabbath-day world over ; 
for though, seriously speaking, we do not deny 
the existence of the tranquil and solitary con- 
templations just alluded to, yet assuredly they 
are as nothing compared to the thoughts con- 
nected with every-day matters ; and love, 
fortunately, is an every-day matter, as well as 
money. Our Sunday streets look dull enough, 
Heaven knows, especially in the more trading 
parts of the metropolis. At the west end of 
the town, in Marylebone, and the squares, it 
looks no duller than it does on other days ; 
and taking the spirit of the thing, there is no 
real Sunday among the rich. Their going to 
church is a lounge and a show ; their meals are 
the same as at other times ; their evenings the 
same ; there is no difference in the look of 
their houses outside. But in the city, the 
Strand, &c, the shutting-up of the shops gives 
an extreme aspect of dulness and melancholy 
to the streets. Those windows, full of gaiety, 
and colour, and bustle, being shut, the eyes 
of the houses seem put out. The clean clothes 
and comparatively staid demeanour of the 
passengers make no amends for the loss ; for 
with the exception of special friends and 
visitors, lovers in particular, it is well under- 
stood in London, that Sunday is really a dull 
day to most people. They have outlived the 
opinions which gave it an interest of a pecu- 
liar sort, and their notions of religion have 
become either too utilitarian or too cheerful 
to admire the old fashion of the day any 
longer. Rest, with insipidity, is its character 
in the morning, newspaper reading excepted : 
church is reckoned dull, perhaps attended 
out of mere habit " and for the sake of 
example," or avoided from day to day, till 
non-attendance becomes another habit : din- 
ner under any circumstances is looked to with 
eagerness as the great relief; the day then 
brightens up with the help of an extra dish, [ 
pudding, or friend ; and the visits of friends I 
help to make the evening as lively as it well ; 
can be without the charm of business and 
money-taking. Should there be no visitors, 
the case is generally helpless. The man and 
wife yawn, or are quiet, or dispute ; a little 
bit of book is read, till the reader complains of 
" weak eyes," or says that it is unaccountable 
how sleepy reading makes him, considering he 
is so " fond " of it ; bibs are pulled up about 
the gentleman's chin, and gowns admired by 
their fair wearers ; and the patients lounge 
towards the window, to wonder whether it is 
fine, or is clearing up, or to look at the rain- 
drops, or see what Mrs. Smith is doing over 
the way. The young gentlemen or ladies 
look at the Bible, or the calendar, or the 
army-list, or the last magazine, or their trinkets, 
and wonder whether Richard will come ; and 
the little children are told not to sing. 



SUNDAY IN LONDON. 



81 : 



But the lovers ! 

These, however, we shall keep till the last, 
agreeably to the demands of climax. 

But, stay a moment. — 

So tender, or rather, according to Mr. 
Bentham's philosophy, so " extra-regarding 
prudent," and so " felicity-maximising/' is 
our heart, that we fear we may have been 
thought a little hard, by those whom we have 
described as uniting a sleepiness over their 
books with a profession of astonishment at 
their tendency, considering they are " so fond 
of books." But mistake us not, dear non- 
readers who happen to be reading us, or who 
read a newspaper though you read little else. 
Nothing would we ever willingly say to the 
useless mortification of anybody, much less of 
those who love anything whatsoever, especially 
a newspaper ; and all the fault we find with 
you is, for thinking it necessary to vindicate 
your reputation for sense and sympathy on 
one particular score, when you might do it to 
better advantage by regretting the want of the 
very fondness you lay claim to. For in claim- 
ing to be fond of books, when you are not, you 
show yourselves unaware of the self-know- 
ledge which books help us to obtain ; whereas, 
if you boldly and candidly expressed your 
regret at not being fond of them, you would 
show that you had an understanding so far 
superior to the very want of books, and far 
greater than that of the mechanical scholar, 
who knows the words in them, and nothing 
else. You would show that you knew what 
you wanted, and were aware of the pleasures 
that you missed : and perhaps it would turn 
out, on inquiry, that you had only been indif- 
ferent to books in the gross, because you had 
not met with the sort of reading suitable to 
your turn of mind. Now, we are not bound 
to like books unsuitable to us, any more than 
a poet is bound to like law-books, or a lawyer 
the study of Arabic, or a musician any books 
but his own feelings ; nor is any one, more 
than the musician, bound to like books at all, 
provided he loves the things which books 
teach us to love, and is for sowing harmony 
and advancement around him, in tones of 
good-humour and encouragement, to the kindly 
dance of our planet. 

One of the pleasantest sights on a Sunday 
morning in the metropolis — to us, of course, 
particularly so — but justly also to all well- 
disposed and thinking Christians — is the 
numerous shops exhibiting weekly papers for 
sale — the placards of our hebdomadal brethren, 
blue, yellow, and white, vociferous with large 
types, and calling the passenger's attention to 
Parliamentary investigations, monstrous con- 
victions, horrible murders, noble philanthro- 
pies, and the humanities of books, theatres, 
and the fine arts. Justly did the divine heart, 
who suffered his disciples to pluck the ears of 
corn, and would have the sheep extricated ! 



from the ditch on a Sabbath, refuse to discon- 
nect the day of worship Avith works of neces- 
sity and mercy ; and what so necessary for the 
poor, the especial objects of his regard, as a 
knowledge of what can be done for them ? 
what so merciful as to help them to supply 
their wants both of body and mind ? Leaving 
this more serious part of the subject (which, 
however, is not inharmoniously mixed up with 
our lighter matter, for the greatest gravity 
and the most willing cheerfulness have but one 
object), we pass by the other open or peeping 
shops (such as the pastry-cooks' who keep up 
the supply of indigestion, and the apothecary's 
who is conveniently ready against the conse- 
quences), and stop a moment at our friend the 
barber's, who provides a newspaper for his 
waiting customers, as men of his trade formerly 
provided a lute or a guitar. The solace is not 
so elegant. There must have been something 
very peculiar, and superior to the occasion, in 
the sound of a guitar in a barber's shop — of 
" Beauty retire," gracefully played into the 
face of a long-visaged old gentleman under the 
soap-suds ; or, 

* ' Since first I saw your face I resolved 
To honour and renown you ; " 



In this pleasant place retired ; " 
" Come if you dare ; " 



just as the operator's fingers were approaching 
the patient's nose. The newspaper, however, 
though not so choice, or furnishing opportuni- 
ties to the poor polite to show the selectness 
and segregation of their accomplishments, shows 
a higher refinement on the part of the poor in 
general, or the many. But we must be moving 
onward. 

There is the bell going for church. Forth 
come Mrs. and Miss A ; then the Mr. B's, 
in their new brown coats and staid gloves ; 
then Mr. Mrs. and the Miss C's, in a world of 
new bonnets and ribands. Oh, ho ! young 
Mr. D, from over the way, joins them, and is 
permitted to walk with Miss C by herself ; so 
the thing is certain. See ! she explains to 
him that she has forgotten her prayer-book — 
by accident ; and he joyfully shows her his 
own ; which means, that he means to read the 
Collect with her out of the same book ; which 
makes her blush and smile, and attempt to 
look gratefully indifferent, which is impos- 
sible ; so she does not much endeavour it, and 
they are both as happy as if the church were ' 
made of tarts and cheesecakes. We are pass- 
ing the church now, so we see no more of 
them. But there is the beadle, in his laced 
hat, taking the apple from the charity boy, 
and looking very angry, for it is not a good 
one ; and there come the E's quarrelling up to 
the church-door about which walks the heaviest ; 
and F, making his sisters laugh beforehand, 



82 



SUNDAY IN LONDON. 



at the way in which the clerk opens his mouth ; 
and G, who hates the parson ; and the parson, 
who hates G ; and H, I, J, K, and L, who are 
indifferent about the matter, and are thinking 
of their dinner, boots, neck-cloths, and next 
day ; and, not to go through the whole alpha- 
bet, here is M, dashing up in his carriage, 
which the coachman is to keep for him, till he 
has " walked humbly with his God," and is 
ready to strut forth again. 

In childhood the church bells used to make 
us melancholy. They have not that effect now. 
The reason we take to be, that they sound- 
ed to us then from the remote regions of the 
whole world out of doors, and of all the untried 
hopes and fears and destinies which they con- 
tained. We have since known them more 
familiarly, and our regard is greater and even 
more serious, though mixed with cheerfulness, 
and is not at all melancholy, except when the 
bell tolls for a funeral ; which custom by the 
way is a nuisance, and ought to be abolished, 
if only out of consideration for the sick and 
sorrowful. One of the reasons why church 
bells have become cheerful to us, is the having 
been accustomed to hear them among the 
cheerful people of Tuscany. The Catholic 
countries' bells are ringing at all seasons, not 
always to the comfort of those who hear them ; 
but the custom has associated them in our 
minds with sunshine and good-nature. We 
also like them on account of their frequency 
in colleges. Finally, they remind us of 
weddings and other holidays ; and there is 
one particular little jingle in some of them, 
which brings to our memory the walking to 
church by the side of a parent, and is very 
dear to us. 



XXXVI.— SUNDAY IN LONDON. 

No. II. 

Hard is it, thou coming kindness, and hard, 
thou already-existing knowledge, and kindness 
too, of Christian philanthropists and philoso- 
phers, not to feel a wish to take the cane out of the 
hands of the beadle yonder, who is tyrannising 
over barrow-women and little boys, and lay it 
about his own hat. In the name of God, what 
sort of Christianity would the law have, if it is 
not to be Christian ? — if it is not to prefer 
"spirit" to "letter ?" There are some men, 
according to whose notions it would appear 
as if heaven itself ought to shut up shop 
on Sundays, and afford us no light and sun- 
shine. We verily believe, that they think 
the angels go to church on that day, and put 
on clean wings, and that St. Paul preaches a 
sermon. 

See now — here comes a little fellow whom 
they would suppress, clean as a pink, far 
happier than a prince, a sort of little angel 
himself, making allowance for the pug-nose ; 



but innocence and happiness are in his face, 
and before him (not to speak it profanely) is 
the beatific vision of the piece of hot mutton, 
which he is carrying home from the baker's, 
and devouring with his eyes. He is an honest 
boy, for his mother has trusted him with carry- 
ing the meat and the baked potatoes ; and it is 
the only bit of meat which he or she, or his 
father, can get to eat all the week round ; and 
his little sisters are to have some of it, for they 
have all been good, and helped to earn it ; and 
so here is a whole, good, hard-working, honest 
family, whom the religious eaters of hot meat 
every day would prevent from having their 
bit on Sundays, because why ? Because it 
would do the poor souls any harm ? No ; but 
because it would do their rich dictators the 
harm of seeing their own pragmatical will and 
pleasure opposed, — humours, the very result 
perhaps of their own stuffing and indiges- 
tion. 

A Sunday evening in London, with its 
musical and other social meetings, such as 
cannot take place between men in business 
during the rest of the week, has parties enough 
to render it much livelier than it appears. But 
the lovers — the lovers are the thing. With 
them we begin, and with them we conclude ; 
for what so good to begin or to end with 
as love ? We loved as early as we can re- 
collect ; we love now ; and our death will be a 
loving one, let it be coloured otherwise as it 
may. 

When we speak of lovers on a Sunday even- 
ing, we mean, of course, lovers who cannot well 
visit on any other day in the week ; and whose 
meetings, therefore, are rendered as intense as 
they can be by the infrequency. What signify 
the circumstances that may have hindered 
them ? Let them be button-making, bread- 
making, or a clerkship, or servitude, or any 
other chance or condition of life, what care we, 
provided the love be genuine, and the pleasure 
truly felt ? Burns was a ploughman, Allan 
Ramsay a hair-dresser, Gay at one time a 
mercer, Richardson a printer, Dodsley a foot- 
man. Do we suppose that the authors of " Sir 
Charles Grandison," " Black-Eyed Susan," and 
the finest love-songs in the world, did not 
make as cordial and exquisite lovers as the 
best-bred gentlemen about town ? and that 
their mistresses and they did not worship 
each other with a vivacity and a passion in- 
finite ? 

Our Sunday lover, then, is an apprentice or 
a clerk, and his mistress is a tradesman's 
daughter, and they meet only on Sundays and 
Sunday evenings, counting every minute till 
the time arrives, listening to every knock, 
trying to look calm when the other joins the 
family party ; for they seldom see one another 
alone, even then. But now they are at least 
in the same room, and happiness is with them. 
They see and hear each other ; they see the 



SUNDAY IN THE SUBURBS. 



83 



little manoeuvres to get a nearer seat ; at 
length they sit close together. The parents 
are not displeased, and let things take their 
course. This is, perhaps, the happiest time of 
courtship — when lovers feel secure of one 
another's affections, and only have just suf- 
ficient doubt of other security to make every- 
thing seem dependent on themselves and the 
result of their own will and choice. By 
degrees, as the family divide in their talk, 
they are suffered to talk exclusively together. 
Every word is precious ; every question the 
most indifferent has a meaning : it is sufficient 
for one to say « I like this," or " I like that," 
and the other thinks it a charming observation 
— a proof of fine sense, or feeling, or taste, or 
above all, of love ; for the eyes or the quivering 
lips, or the panting bosom, speak with it ; and 
the whole intercourse, whether speaking or 
silent, is one of intense acquiescence and 
delight. A gentleman comes up and gallantly 
addresses some smiling remark to the lady ; 
the lover, if he is not quite sure of her mind, 
begins to be jealous. The gentleman moves 
off, and a remark at his expense prostrates the 
lover's soul with gratitude. The lady leaves 
the room to put a child to bed, or speak to a 
sister, or look after the supper, and darkness 
falls upon the place. She returns, and her 
footsteps, her face, her frock, her sweet counte- 
nance, is thrice blessed, and brings happiness 
back again. She resumes her chair, with a 
soft " thank ye " as he elaborately, and for no 
need whatsoever, puts it in its best position for 
being resumed ; and never, he thinks, did soul, 
breath, and bosom, go so sweetly together as 
in the utterance of that simple phrase. For her 
part, she has, secretly, hardly any bounds to 
her gratitude ; and it is lucky that they are 
both excellent good people, otherwise the 
very virtues of one or other of them might 
be their destruction. (Ah ! they will think of 
this in aftertimes, and not look with severe 
countenances on the victims of the less honour- 
able.) At length they sit looking over some 
pictures together, or a book, which they are as 
far from reading as if they did not see it. They 
turn over the leaves, however, with a charming 
hypocrisy, and even carry their eyes along the 
lines ; their cheeks touch — his hand meets 
hers, by favour of the table-cloth or the 
handkerchief ; its pressure is returned ; you 
might hear their hearts beat, if you could 
listen. 

Oh ! welcome, war ; welcome, sorrow ; wel- 
come, folly, mistake, perverseness, disease, 
death, disappointment, all the ills of life, 
and the astonishments of man's soul ! Those 
moments, nay, the recollections of them, are 
worth the whole payment. Our children will 
love, as we have loved, and so cannot be wholly 
miserable. To love, even if not beloved, is to 
have the sweetest of faiths, and riches fineless, 
which nothing can take from us but our own 



unworthiness. And once to have loved truly, 
is to know how to continue to love everything 
which unlovingness has not had a hand in 
altering — all beauties of nature and of mind, 
all truth of heart, all trees, flowers, skies, hopes, 
and good beliefs, all dear decays of person, 
fading towards a two-fold grave, all trusts in 
heaven, all faiths in the capabilities of loving 
man. Love is a perpetual proof that something 
good and earnest and eternal is meant us, such 
a bribe and foretaste of bliss being given us to 
keep us in the lists of time and progression : 
and when the world has realised what love 
urges it to obtain, perhaps death will cease ; 
and all the souls which love has created, crowd 
back at its summons to inhabit their perfected 
world. 

Truly we have finished our Sunday evening 
with a rapt and organ-like note. Let the 
reader fancy he has heard an organ indeed. 
Its voice is not unapt for the production of 
such thoughts, in those who can rightly listen 
to its consummate majesty and warbling modu- 
lations. 

[Something yet remains to be said of " Sun- 
day in the Suburbs."] 



XXXVII. — SUNDAY IN THE SUBURBS. 

BEING MORE LAST WORDS ON 'SUNDAY IN LONDON:' 
WITH A DIGRESSION ON THE NAME OF SMITH. 

In writing our articles on this subject, we 
have been so taken up, first with the dull look 
of the Sunday streets, and afterwards with the 
lovers who make their walls lively on the 
hidden side, that we fairly overlooked a feature 
in our Metropolitan Sabbath, eminently sab- 
batical ; to wit, the suburbs and their holiday- 
makers. What a thing to forget ! What a 
thing to forget, even if it concerned only Smith 
in his new hat and boots ! Why, he has been 
thinking of them all the week ; and how could 
we, who sympathise with all the Smith-ism 
and boots in existence, forget them ? The 
hatter did not bring home his hat till last 
night, the boot-maker his boots till this morn- 
ing. How did not Smith (and he is a shrewd 
fellow too, and reads us) pounce upon the hat- 
box, undo its clinging pasteboard lid, whisk off 
the silver paper, delicately develop the dear 
beaver, and put it on before the glass ! The 
truth must be owned : — he sate in it half 
supper-time. Never was such a neat fit. All 
Aldersgate, and the City-road, and the New- 
road, and Camden and Kentish towns, glided 
already before him, as he went along in it, — 
hatted in thought. He could have gone to 
sleep in it, — if it would not have spoiled his 
nap, and its own. 

Then his boots ! — Look at him. — There he 
goes; — up Somers-town. Who would suspect, 
from the ease and superiority of his coimte- 



84 



SUNDAY IN THE SUBURBS. 



nance, that he had not had his boots above two 
hours, — that he had been a good fourth part of 
the time labouring and fetching the blood up 
in his face with pulling them on with his boot- 
hooks, — and that at this moment they horribly 
pinch him ! But he has a small foot — has Jack 
Smith ; and he would squeeze, jam, and 
damn it into a thimble, rather than acknow- 
ledge it to be a bit larger than it seems. 

Do not think ill of him, especially you that 
are pinched a little less. Jack has sympathies ; 
and as long as the admiration of the commu- 
nity runs towards little feet and well-polished 
boots, he cannot dispense, in those quarters, 
with the esteem of his fellow-men. As the 
sympathies enlarge, Jack's boots will grow 
wider ; and we venture to prophesy, that at 
forty he will care little for little feet, and much 
for his corns and the public good. We are the 
more bold in this anticipation, from certain 
reminiscences we have of boots of our own. 
"We shall not enter into details, for fear of 
compromising the dignity of literature ; but 
the good-natured may think of them what they 
please. Non ignara mali (said Dido), miseris 
succurrere disco : that is, having known what it 
was to wear shoes too small herself, she should 
never measure, for her part, the capabilities of 
a woman's head, by the pettiness of her 
slippers. 

Napoleon was proud of a little foot ; and 
Caesar, in his youth, was a dandy. So go on, 
Smith, and bear your tortures like a man ; 
especially towards one o'clock, when it will be 
hot and dusty. 

Smith does not carry a cane with a twist at 
the top of it for a handle. That is for an in- 
ferior grade of holiday-maker, who pokes about 
the suburbs, gaping at the new buildings, or 
treats his fellow-servant to a trip to White 
Conduit-house, and an orange by the way — 
always too sour. Smith has a stick or a whan- 
ghee ; or, if he rides, a switch. He is not a 
good rider ; and we must say it is his own 
fault, for he rides only on Sundays, and will 
not scrape acquaintance with, the ostler on 
other days of the week. You may know him 
on horseback by the brisk forlornness of his 
steed, the inclined plane of his body, the ex- 
treme outwardness or inwardness of his toes, 
and an expression of face betwixt ardour, fear, 
and indifference. He is the most without a 
footman of any man in the world ; that is to 
say, he has the most excessive desire to be 
taken for a man who ought to have one ; and, 
therefore, the space of road behind him pur- 
sues him, as it were, with the reproach of its 
emptiness. 

A word, by the way, as to our use of the 
generic name 'Smith.' A Correspondent wrote 
to us the other day, intimating that it would 
be a good-natured thing if we refrained in future 
from designating classes of men by the name 
of ' Tomkins.' We know not whether he was 



a Tomkins himself, or whether he only felt 
for some friend of that name, or for the whole 
body of the Tomkinses; all we know is, that he 
has taken the word out of our mouth for ever. 
How many paragraphs he may have ruined by 
it, we cannot say ; but the truth is, he has 
us on our weak side. We can resist no appeal 
to our good-nature made by a good-natured 
man. Besides, we like him for the seriousness 
and good faith with which he took the matter 
to heart, and for the niceness of his sympathy. 
Adieu, then, name of Tomkins ! Jenkins also, 
for a like respectful reason, we shall abstain 
from in future. But let nobody interfere in 
behalf of Smith ; for Smith does not want it. 
Smith is too universal. Even a John Smith 
could not regard the use of his name as per- 
sonal ; for John Smith, as far as his name is 
concerned, has no personality. He is a class, 
a huge body ; he has a good bit of the 
Directory to himself. You may see for pages 
together (if our memory does not deceive us) 
John Smith, John Smith, John Smith, or 
rather, 

Smith, John, 

Smith, John, 

Smith, John, 

Smith, John, 

Smith, John, 

Smith, John, 
and so on, with everlasting Smith-Jolmism, 
like a set of palisades or iron rails ; almost as 
if you could make them clink as you go, with 
drawing something along them. The repeti- 
tion is dazzling. The monotony bristles with 
sameness. It is a chemux-de-Smiih. John Smith 
in short, is so public and multitudinous a per- 
sonage, that we do not hesitate to say we 
know an excellent individual of that name, 
whose regard we venture thus openly to boast 
of, without fearing to run any danger of offend- 
ing his modesty : for nobody will know, whom 
we mean. An Italian poet says he hates his 
name of John, because if anybody calls him by 
it in the street, twenty people look out of 
window. Now let anybody call "John Smith !" 
and half Holborn will cry out " Well ?" 

As to other and famous Smiths, they are too 
strongly marked out by their fame, sometimes 
by their Christian names, and partly, indeed, by 
the uncommon lustre they attain through their 
very commonness, to make us at all squeamish 
in helping ourselves to their generic appellation 
at ordinary times. Who will ever think of 
confounding Smith, in the abstract, with Adam 
Smith, or Sir Sydney Smith, or the Reverend 
Sydney Smith, or James and Horace Smith, or 
Dr. Southwood Smith, or any other concre- 
tion of wit, bravery, or philosophy ? 

By this time, following, as we talk, our friend 
Jack up the road, we arrive at the first suburb 
tea-gardens, which he, for his part, passes with 
disdain ; not our friend, John Smith, be it ob- 
served, for his philosophy is as universal as his 



A HUMAN BEING AND A CROWD. 



05 



name ; but Jack Smith, our friend of the new 
hat and boots. And yet he will be a philoso- 
pher, too, by-and-by : and his boots shall help 
him to philosophise ; but all in good time. 
Meanwhile, we who are old enough to consult 
our inclination in preference to our grandeur, 
turn into the tea-gardens, where there is no 
tea going forward, and not much garden, but 
worlds of beer, and tobacco-pipes, and alcoves ; 
and in a corner behind some palings there is 
(we fear) a sound of skittles. May no un- 
christian christian hear it, who is twirling his 
thumbs, or listening to the ring of his wine- 
glasses. How hot the people look ! how un- 
pinned the goodly old dames! how tired, yet 
untired, the children ! and how each alcove 
opens upon you as you pass, with its talk, 
smoke, beer, and bad paint ! Then what a 
feast to their eyes is the grass-plat ! Truly, 
without well knowing it, do they sit down 
almost as much to the enjoyment of that green 
table of Nature's in the midst of them, as to 
their tobacco and * half-and-half." It is some- 
thing which they do not see all the rest of the 
week ; the first bit of grass, of any size, which 
I they come to from home ; and here they stop 
! and are content. For our parts, we wish they 
would go further, as Smith does, and get fairly 
out in the fields ; but they will do that, as they 
become freer, and wiser, and more comfortable, 
and learn to know and love what the wild- 
flowers have to say to them. At present how 
should they be able to hear those small angelic 
voices, when their ears are ringing with stock- 
ing-frames and crying children, and they are 
but too happy ..in their tired-heartedness to get 
to the first bit of holiday ground they can 
reach ? 

We come away, and mingle with the crowds 
returning home, among whom we recognise 
our friend of the twisted cane, and his lass ; 
who looks the reddest, proudest, and most as- 
sured of maid-servants, and sometimes "snubs" 
him a little, out loud, to show her power ; 
though she loves every blink of his eye. 
Yonder is a multitude collected round a me- 
thodist preacher, whom they think far "behind 
his age," extremely ignorant of yesterday's un- 
stamped, but "well-meaning," a "poor mistaken 
fellow, sir :" and they will not have him hustled 
by the police. Lord X. should hear what they 
say. It might put an idea in his head. 

The gas-lights begin to shine ; the tide of the 
crowd grows thinner ; chapel- windows are lit 
up ; maid-servants stand in door-ways ; married 
couples carry their children, or dispute about 
them ; and children, not carried, cry for spite, 
and jumble their souls out. 

As for Smith, he is in some friend's room, 
very comfortable, with his brandy and water 
beside him, his coloured handkerchief on his 
knee, and his boots intermittent* 



XXXVIII. 



A HUMAN BEING AND 
A CROWD. 



* Intermit — " To grow mild between the fits or 
paroxysms. "—Johnson. 



The reader will allow us to relate him an 
apologue. — A Seer of visions, walking out one 
evening, just before twilight, saw a being 
standing in a corner by the way-side, such 
as he never remembered to have seen before. 
It said nothing, and threatened him no harm : 
it seemed occupied with its own thoughts, 
looking in an earnest manner across the fields, 
where some children were playing ; and its 
aspect was inexpressibly affecting. Its eyes 
were very wonderful, a mixture of something 
that was at once substance and no substance, 
body and spirit ; and it seemed as if there 
would have been tears in them, but for a 
certain dry-looking heat, in which neverthe- 
less was a still stranger mixture of indifference 
and patience, of hope and despair. Its hands, 
which it now and then lifted to its head, 
appeared to be two of the most wonderful in- 
struments that were ever beheld. Its cheeks 
varied their size in a remarkable manner, 
being now sunken, now swollen, or apparently 
healthy, but always of a marvellous formation, 
and capable, it would seem, of great beauty, 
had the phenomenon been happy. The lips, 
in particular, expressed this capability ; and 
now and then the creature smiled at some 
thought that came over it ; and then it looked 
sorrowful, and then angry, and then patient 
again, and finally, it leaned against the tree 
near which it stood, with a gesture of great 
weariness, and heaved a sigh which went to 
the very heart of the beholder. The latter 
stood apart, screened from its sight, and looked 
towards it with a deep feeling of pity, reve- 
rence, and awe. At length the creature moved 
from its place, looked first at the fields, then 
at the setting sun, and after putting its hands 
together, in an attitude of prayer, and again 
looking at the fields andthe children, drew down, 
as if from an unseen resting place, a huge bur- 
then of some kind or other, which it received 
on its head and shoulders ; and so with a tran- 
quil and noble gesture, more affecting than 
any symptom it had yet exhibited, went glid- 
ing onwards towards the sunset, at once bent 
with weakness, and magnificent for very power. 
The seer then, before it got out of sight, saw 
it turn round yearning towards the children ; 
but what was his surprise, when on turning 
its eyes upon himself, he recognised, for the 
first time, an exact counterpart of his own 
face ; in fact, himself looking at himself ! 

Yes, dear reader, the seer was the phenom- 
enon and the phenomenon is a human being, 
any care-worn man; you yourself, if you are such ; 
or the Seer of the other sights in this book ; — 
with this difference, however, as far as regards 
you and us ; that inasmuch as we are readers 
and writers of things hopeful, we are more 
hopeful, people, and possess the twofold faith 



86 



A HUMAN BEING AND A CROWD. 



which the phenomenon seems to have thought 
a divided one, and not to be united ; that is 
to say, we think hopefully of heaven and hope- 
fully of earth ; we behold the sunset shining 
towards the fields and the little children, in 
all the beauty of its double encouragement. 

A human being, whatever his mistakes, 
whatever his cares, is, in the truest and most 
literal sense of the word, a respectable being 
(pray believe it) ; — nay, an awful, were he 
not also a loving being ; — a mystery of won- 
derful frame, hope, and capacity, walking be- 
tween heaven and earth. To look into his 
eyes is to see a soul. He is surely worth 
twice, thrice, and four times looking at and 
considering*, — worth thinking what we can 
do for him, and he for us, and all for each 
other. Our general impressions of things (as 
the reader knows) are cheerful, and ready to 
receive abundance of pleasure. Our greatest 
sorrow, when we look abroad, is to think that 
mankind do not extract a millionth part of 
the pleasure they might, from the exceeding 
riches of Nature ; and it is speedily swallowed 
up by a conviction, that Nature being so rich, 
and inciting them to find it out, find it out 
they will. But meanwhile, we look upon the 
careful faces we meet — upon the human phe- 
nomenon and his perplexities, — and as long as 
our sorrow lasts, an indescribable emotion 
siezes us, of pity and respect. 

We feel a tenderness for every man when 
we consider that he has been an infant, and 
a respect for him when we see that he has 
had cares. And if such be the natural feelings 
of reflection towards individual faces, how 
much more so towards a multitude of them — 
towards an assemblage — a serious and anxious 
crowd ? 

We believe, that without any reference to 
politics whatsoever, no man of reflection or 
sensibility looked upon the great and moving 
mass and succession of human beings, which 
assembled a little while ago in London, without 
being consciously or unconsciously moved with 
emotions of this kind. How could they help 
it ? A crowd is but the reduplication of our- 
selves, — of our own faces, fears, hopes, wants, 
and relations, — our own connexions of wives 
and children, — our own strengths, weaknesses, 
formidable power, pitiable tears. We may 
differ with it, we may be angry with it, fear 
it, think we scorn it ; but we must scorn our- 
selves first, or have no feeling and imagina- 
tion. All the hearts beating in those bosoms 
are palpitations of our own. We feel them 
somehow or other, and glow, or turn pale. 
We cannot behold ourselves in that shape of 
power or mighty want, and not feel that we 
are men. 

We have only to fancy ourselves born in 
any particular class, and to have lived, loved, 
and suffered in it, in order to feel for the mis- 



* Respectable, respcctabilis (Latin), worth again looking at. 



takes and circumstances of those who belong to 
it, even when they appear to sympathise least 
with ourselves : for that also is a part of what 
is to be pitied in them. The less they feel for 
us, the less is the taste of their own pleasures, 
and the less their security against a fall. Who 
that has any fancy of this kind, can help 
feeling for all those aristocrats, especially the 
young and innocent among them, that were 
brought to the scaffold during the French 
revolution ? Who for all those democrats, 
not excepting the fiercest that were brought 
there also — some of whom surprised the by- 
standers with the tendernes of their domestic 
recollections,and the faltering ejaculations they 
made towards the wives and children they left 
behind them ? Who does not feel for the mis- 
taken popish conspirators, the appalling story 
of whose execution is told in one of Disraeli's 
books, with that godlike woman in it, who is 
never to be passed over when it is mentioned ? 
Who does not feel for the massacres of St. Bar- 
tholomew, of Ireland, of Sicily, of any place ; 
and the more because they are perpetrated by 
men upon their fellow-creatures, the victims 
and victim-makers of pitiable mistake ? The 
world are finding out that mistake ; and not 
again in a hurry, we trust, will anything like 
it be repeated among civilised people. All 
are learning to make allowance for one another: 
but we must not forget, among our lessons, 
that the greatest allowances are to be made 
for those who suffer the most. Also, the 
greatest number of reflections should be made 
for them. 

Blessings on the progress of reflection and 
knowledge, which made that great meeting 
we speak of as quiet as it was ! We have 
received many letters from friends and cor- 
respondents on the setting up of this paper 
for which we have reason to be grateful ; but 
not one which has pleased us so much (nor, we 
are sure, with greater leave from the rest 
to be so pleased) than a communication from 
our old "Tatler" friend, S. W. H. in which 
he tells us that he saw a copy of it in the 
hands of " one of the sturdiest " of the trades' 
unions, who was "reading it as he marched 
along ;" and who (adds our correspondent) 
" could hardly be thinking of burning down 
half London, even if the government did con- 
tinue bent upon not receiving his petition." 

May we ever be found in such hands on 
such occasions. It will do harm, to nobody 
in the long-run ; will prevent no final good ; 
and assuredly encourage no injustice, final or 
intermediate. " To sympathise with all " is 
an old motto on our flag. None, therefore, 
can be omitted in our sympathy ; and assuredly 
not those who compose the greatest part of 
all. If w r e did not feel for them as we do, we 
should not feel for their likenesses in more 
prosperous shapes. 

We had thought of saying something upon 



A HUMAN BEING AND A CROWD. 



87 



crowds under other circumstances, such as 
crowds at theatres, and in churches, crowds 
at executions, crowds on holidays, &c. ; but 
the interest of the immediate ground of our 
reflections has absorbed us. We will close 
this article however, with one of the most 
appalling descriptions of a crowd under cir- 
cumstances of exasperation, that our memory 
refers us to. On sending for the book that 
contains it to the circulating library, (for 
though too like the truth, it is a work of 
fiction,) we find that it is not quite so well- 
written, or simple in its intensity, as our re- 
collection had fancied it. Nothing had re- 
mained in our memory but the roar of the 
multitude, the violence of a moment, and a 
shapeless remnant of a body. But the passage 
is still very striking. Next to the gratifica- 
tion of finding ourselves read by the many, is 
the discovery that our paper finds its way into 
certain accomplished and truly gentlemanly 
hands, very fit to grapple, in the best and 
most kindly manner, with those many ; and 
to these, an extract at this time of day, from 
Monk Lewis's novel, will have a private as 
well as public interest. 

The author is speaking of an abbess, who 
has been guilty of the destruction of a nun 
under circumstances of great cruelty. An in- 
furiated multitude destroy her, under circum- 
stances of great cruelty on their own parts ; 
and a lesson, we conceive, is here read, both to 
those who exasperate crowds of people, and to 
the crowds that, almost before they are aware of it, 
reduce a fellow-creature to a mass of unsight- 
liness. For, though vengeance was here in- 
tended, and perhaps death (which is what we 
had not exactly sujrposed, from our recollec- 
tion of the passage,) yet it is not certain that 
the writer wished us to understand as much, 
however violent the mob may have become by 
dint of finding they had gone so far ; and 
what we wish to intimate is, that a human 
being may be seized by his angry fellow-crea- 
tures, and by dint of being pulled hither and 
thither, and struck at, even with no direct mor- 
tal intentions on their parts, be reduced in the 
course of a few frightful moments to a condi- 
tion, which, in the present reflecting state of 
the community, would equally fill with remorse 
the parties that regarded it, on either side, — the 
one from not taking care to avoid giving offence, 
and the other from not considering how far their 
resentment of it might lead ; — a mistake from 
which, thank Heaven, the good sense and pre- 
cautions of both parties saved them on the 
occasion we allude to. 



"St. Ursula's narrative," says Mr. Lewis, speak- 
ing of a nun who had taken part against the abbess, 
and who was relating her cruelty to the people, 
"created horror and surprise throughout; but when 
she related the inhuman murder of Agnes, the in- 
dignation of the mob was so audibly testified, that it 
was scarcely possible to hear the conclusion. This 
confusion increased with every moment. At length 
a multitude of voices exclaimed, that the prioress 
should be given up to their fury. To this Don Ramirez 
positively refused to consent. Even Lorenzo bade 
the people remember that she had undergone no 
trial, and advised them to leave her punishment to 
the Inquisition. All representations were fruitless ; 
the disturbance grew still more violent, and the 
populace more exasperated. In vain did Ramirez 
attempt to convey his prisoner out of the throng. 
Wherever he turned, a band of rioters barred his 
passage, and demanded her being delivered over 
to them more loudly than before. Ramirez ordered 
his attendants to cut their way through the mul- 
titude. Oppressed by numbers, it was impossible 
for them to draw their swords. He threatened 
the mob with the vengeance of the Inquisition : 
but, in this moment of popular frenzy, even this 
dreadful name had lost its effect. Though regret 
for his sister made him look upon the prioress with 
abhorrence, Lorenzo could not help pitying a 
woman in a situation so terrible : but in spite of 
all his exertions and those of the duke, of don 
Ramirez and the archers, the people continued to 
press onwards. They forced a passage through 
the guards who protected their destined victim, 
dragged her from her shelter, and proceeded to 
take upon her a most summary and cruel venge- 
ance. Wild with terror, and scarcely knowing 
what she said, the wretched woman shrieked for a 
moment's mercy ; she protested that she was igno- 
rant of the death of Agnes, and could clear herself 
from suspicion beyond the power of doubt. The 
rioters heeded nothing but the gratification of their 
barbarous vengeance. They refused to listen to 
her : they showed her every sort of insult, loaded 
her with mud and filth, and called her by the 
most opprobrious appellations. They tore her one 
from another 1 , and each new tormentor was more 
savage than the former. They stifled with howls 
and execrations her shrill cries for mercy, and 
dragged her through the streets, spurning her, 
trampling her, and treating her with every species 
of cruelty which hate or vindictive fury could in- 
vent. At lengthaflint, aimed by some well-directed 
hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank 
upon the ground bathed in blood, and in a few 
minutes terminated her miserable existence. Yet 
though she no longer felt their insults, the rioters 
still exercised their impotent rage upon the lifeless 
body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, 
till it became no more than a mass of flesh, un- 
sightly, shapeless, and disgusting. " 



END OF PART THE FIRST. 



THE SEER; 



COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED 



PART II. 



LONDON : 
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRJARS. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

XXXIX. THE CAT BY THE FIRE 1 

XL. PUT UP A PICTURE IN YOUR ROOM . . . . . ' . . . . 3 

XLI. A GENTLEMAN-SAINT 5 

XLII. THE EVE OF ST. AGNES 12 

XLIH. A "NOW;" DESCRIPTIVE OF A COLD DAY 18 

XLIV. ICE,— WITH POETS UPON IT 20 

XLV. THE PIANO-FORTE 23 

XLVI. WHY SWEET MUSIC PRODUCES SADNESS 27 

XLVII. DANCING AND DANCERS 28 

XLVni. TWELFTH NIGHT.— A STREET PORTRAIT.— SHAKSPEARE'S PLAY.-RECOL- 

LECTIONS OF A TWELFTH NIGHT . . 31 

XLIX. RULES IN MAKING PRESENTS . 34 

L. ROMANCE OF COMMON-PLACE , ib. 

LI. AMIABLENESS SUPERIOR TO INTELLECT 35 

LII. LIFE AFTER DEATH— BELIEF IN SPIRITS 37 

LIIL ON DEATH AND BURIAL 39 

LIV. ON WASHERWOMEN ... .42 

LV. THE NIGHTMARE .44 

LVI. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED . . 46 

LVH. THE FLORENTINE LOVERS . • 

LVIII. RHYME AND REASON : OR, A NEW PROPOSAL TO THE PUBLIC RESPECTING 

POETRY IN ORDINARY 59 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

LIX. VICISSITUDES OF A LECTURE: OR, PUBLIC ELEGANCE AND PRIVATE NON- 
PARTICULARITY 61 

LX. THE FORTUNES OF GENIUS 63 

LXI. POETS' HOUSES 66 

LXII. A JOURNEY BY COACH— (A FRAGMENT) . 68 

LXHI. (CONTINUED) 69 

LXIV. (CONTINUED) . . 71 

LXV. — . (concluded) 75 

LXVI. INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF THE SUBJECT OF CHRISTMAS ... 77 



T HE SEER 



OR, 



COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED. 



Love adds a precious seeing to the eye."— Shakspeare, 



XXXIX.— THE CAT BY THE FIRE. 

A blazing fire, a warm rug, candles lit and 
curtains drawn, the kettle on for tea (nor do 
the " first circles " despise the preference of a 
kettle to an urn, as the third or fourth may 
do), and finally, the cat before you, attracting 
your attention, — it is a scene which every- 
body likes unless he has a morbid aversion to 
cats ; which is not common. There are some 
nice inquirers, it is true, who are apt to make 
uneasy comparisons of cats with dogs, — to say 
they are not so loving, that they prefer the 
house to the man, &c. But agreeably to the 
good old maxim, that "comparisons are odious," 
our readers, we hope, will continue to like 
what is likeable in anything, for its own sake, 
without trying to render it unlikeable from 
its inferiority to something else, — a process 
by which we might ingeniously contrive to 
put soot into every dish that is set before us, 
and to reject one thing after another, till we 
were pleased with nothing. Here is a good 
fireside, and a cat to it ; and it would be our 
own fault, if, in removing to another house 
I and another fireside, we did not take care that 
the cat removed with us. Cats cannot look to 
the moving of goods, as men do. If we would have 
creatures considerate towards us, we must be 
so towards them. It is not to be expected of 
everybody, quadruped or biped, that they 
should stick to us in spite of our want of merit, 
like a dog or a benevolent sage. Besides, 
stories have been told of cats very much to the 
creditof their benignity; such as their following 
a master about like a dog, waiting at a gentle- 
man's door to thank him for some obligation 
over night, &c. And our readers may remem- 
ber the history of the famous Godolphin Arabian, 
upon whose grave a cat that had lived with him 
in the stable went and stretched itself, and died. 

[PART ii. 1 



The cat purrs, as if it applauded our consi- 
deration, — and gently moves its tail. What an 
odd expression of the power to be irritable and 
the will to be pleased there is in its face, as it 
looks up at us ! We must own, that we do not 
prefer a cat in the act of purring, or of looking 
in that manner. It reminds us of the sort of 
smile, or simmer (simper is too weak and fleeting 
a word) that is apt to be in the faces of irritable 
people when they are pleased to be in a state 
of satisfaction. We prefer, for a general ex- 
pression, the cat in a quiet unpretending state, 
and the human countenance with a look indica- 
tive of habitual grace and composure, as if it 
were not necessary to take any violent steps to 
prove its amiability, — the "smile without a 
smile," as the poet beautifully calls it*. 

Furthermore (in order to get rid at once of 
all that may be objected to poor Pussy, as boys 
at school get down their bad dumpling as fast 
as possible, before the meat comes), we own we 
have an objection to the way in which a cat 
sports with a mouse before she kills it, tossing 
and jerking it about like a ball, and letting it 
go, in order to pounce upon it with the greater 
relish. And yet what right have we to apply 
human measures of cruelty to the inferior re- 
flectability of a cat ? Perhaps she has no idea 
of the mouse's beiDg alive, in the sense that we 
have, — most likely she looks upon it as a plea- 
sant moveable toy, made to be eaten, — a sort 
of lively pudding, that oddly jumps hither and 
thither. It would be hard to beat into the head 
of a country squire, of the old class, that there 
is any cruelty in hunting a hare ; and most as- 
suredly it would be still harder to beat mouse- 
sparing into the head of a cat. You might 
read the most pungent essay on the subject 
into her ear, and she would only sneeze at it. 
* Knowles, in the " Beggar of Bethnal Green." 



THE CAT BY THE FIRE. 



As to the unnatural cruelties, which we 
sometimes read of, committed by cats upon 
their offspring, they are exceptions to the 
common and beautiful rules of nature, and ac- 
cordingly we have nothing to do with them. 
They are traceable to some unnatural circum- 
stances of breeding or position. Enormities as 
monstrous are to be found among human beings, 
and argue nothing against the general charac- 
ter of the species. Even dogs are not always 
immaculate; and sages have made slips. Dr. 
Franklin cut off his son with a shilling, for dif- 
fering with him in politics. 

But cats resemble tigers ? They are tigers 
in miniature ? Well, — and very pretty minia- 
tures they are. And what has the tiger him- 
self done, that he has not a right to his dinner, 
as well as Jones ? A tiger treats a man much 
'as a cat does a mouse ; — granted ; but we have 
no reason to suppose that he is aware of the 
man's sufferings, or means anything but to 
satisfy his hunger ; and what have the butcher 
and poulterer been about, meanwhile ? The 
tiger, it is true, lays about him a little super- 
fluously sometimes, when he gets into a sheep- 
fold, and kills more than he eats ; but does not 
the Squire or the Marquis do pretty much like 
him in the month of September ? Nay, do we 
not hear of venerable judges, that would not 
hurt a fly, going about in that refreshing month, 
seeking whom they may lame ? See the effect 
of habit and education ! And you can educate 
the tiger in no other way than by attending to 
his stomach. Fill that, and he will want no 
men to eat, probably not even to lame. On 
the other hand, deprive Jones of his dinner for 
a day or two, and see what a state he will be in, 
especially if he is by nature irascible. Nay, 
keep him from it for an half-an-hour, and ob- 
serve the tiger propensities of his stomach 
and fingers, — how worthy of killing he thinks 
the cook, and what boxes of the ear he feels in- 
clined to give the footboy. 

Animals, by the nature of things, in their 
present state, dispose of one another into their 
respective stomachs, without ill-will on any 
side. They keep down the several populations 
of their neighbours, till time may come when 
superfluous population of any kind need not 
exist, and predatory appearances may vanish 
from the earth, as the wolves have done from 
England. But whether they may or not, is not 
a question by a hundred times so important to 
moral inquirers, as into the possibilities of 
human education and the nonsense of ill-will. 
Show the nonentity of that, and we may all get 
our dinners as jovially as we can, sure of these 
three undoubted facts, — that life is long, death 
short, and the world beautiful. And so we 
bring our thoughts back again to the fireside, 
and look at the cat. 

Poor Pussy ! she looks up at us again, as if 
she thanked us for those vindications of dinner; 
and symbolically gives a twist of a yawn, and 



a lick to her whiskers. Now she proceeds to 
clean herself all over, having a just sense of 
the demands of her elegant person, — beginning 
judiciously with herpaws,and fetching amazing 
tongues at her hind-hips. Anon, she scratches 
herneck with afoot of rapid delight, leaning her 
head towards it, and shutting her eyes, half to 
accommodate the action of the skin, and half 
to enjoy the luxury. She then rewards her 
paws with a few more touches ; — look at the 
action of her head and neck, how pleasing it is, 
the ears pointed forward, and the neck gently 
arching to and fro. Finally, she gives a sneeze, 
and another twist of mouth and whiskers, and 
then, curling her tail towards her front claws, 
settles herself on her hind quarters, in an atti- 
tude of bland meditation. 

What does she think of ? — Of her saucer of 
milk at breakfast ? or of the thump she got 
yesterday in the kitchen for stealing the meat'? 
or of her own meat, the Tartar's dish, noble 
horse-flesh ? or of her friend the cat next door, 
the most impassioned of serenaders ? or of her 
little ones, some of whom are now large, and 
all of them gone ? Is that among her recollec- 
tions when she looks pensive ? Does she taste 
of the noble prerogative-sorrows of man ? 

She is a sprightly cat, hardly past her youth; 
so happening to move the fringe of the rug a 
little with our foot, she darts out a paw, and 
begins plucking it and inquiring into the matter, 
as if it were a challenge to play, or something 
lively enough to be eaten. What a grace- 
ful action of that foot of hers, between delicacy 
and petulance ! — combining something of a 
thrust out, a beat, and a scratch. There seems 
even something of a little bit of fear in it, as if 
just enough to provoke her courage, and give 
her the excitement of a sense of hazard. We 
remember being much amused with seeing a 
kitten manifestly making a series of experiments 
upon the patience of its mother, — trying how 
far the latter would put up with positive bites 
and thumps. The kitten ran at her every 
moment, gave her a knock or a bite of the tail; 
and then ran back again, to recommence the 
assault. The mother sate looking at her, as if 
betwixt tolerance and admiration to see how 
far the spirit of the family was inherited or 
improved by her sprightly offspring. At 
length, however, the " little Pickle" presumed 
too far, and the mother, lifting up her paw, and 
meeting her at the very nick of the moment, 
gave her one of the most unsophisticated boxes 
of the ear we ever beheld. It sent her rolling 
half over the room, and made her come to a 
most ludicrous pause, with the oddest little 
look of premature and wincing meditation. 

That lapping of the milk out of the saucer is 
what one's human thirst cannot sympathize 
with. It seems as if there could be no satis- 
faction in such a series of atoms of drink. Yet 
the saucer is soon emptied ; and there is a re- 
freshment to one's ears in that sound of plash- 



PUT UP A PICTURE IN YOUR ROOM. 



3 



ing with which the action is accompanied, and 
which seems indicative of a like comfort to 
Pussy's mouth. Her tongue is thin, and can 
make a spoon of itself. This, however, is 
common to other quadrupeds with the cat, and 
does not, therefore, more particularly belong 
to our feline consideration. Not so the elec- 
tricity of its coat, which gives out sparks under 
the hand; its passion for the herb valerian (did 
the reader ever see one roll in it ? it is a mad 
sight) and other singular delicacies of nature, 
among which perhaps is to be reckoned its 
taste for fish, a creature with whose element it 
has so little to do, that it is supposed even to 
abhor it ; though lately we read somewhere of 
a swimming cat, that used to fish for itself. 
And this reminds us of an exquisite anecdote 
of dear, dogmatic, diseased, thoughtful, surly, 
charitable Johnson, who would go out of doors 
himself, and buy oysters for his cat, because 
his black servant was too proud to do it ! Not 
that we condemn the black, in tho.ee enslaving, 
unliberating days. He had a right to the mis- 
take, though we should have thought better of 
him had he seen farther, and subjected his pride 
to affection for such a master. But Johnson's 
true practical delicacy in the matter is beauti- 
ful. Be assured that he thought nothing of 
" condescension" in it, or of being eccentric. 
He was singular in some things, because he 
could not help it. But he hated eccentricity. 
No : in his best moments he felt himself simply 
to be a man, and a good man too, though a 
frail, — one that in virtue as well as humility, 
and in a knowledge of his ignorance as well as 
his wisdom, was desirous of being a Christian 
philosopher ; and accordingly he went out, and 
bought food for his hungry cat, because his 
poor negro was too proud to do it, and there 
was nobody else in the way whom he had a 
right to ask. What must anybody that saw 
him have thought, as he turned up Bolt-court ! 
But doubtless he went as secretly as possible, 
— that is to say, if he considered the thing at 
all. His friend Garrick could not have done as 
much ! He was too grand, and on the great 
" stage" of life. Goldsmith could ; but he 
would hardly have thought of it. Beauclerc 
might ; but he would have thought it neces- 
sary to excuse it with a jest or a wager, or 
some such thing. Sir Joshua Reynolds, with 
his fashionable, fine-lady-painting hand, would 
certainly have shrunk from it. Burke would 
have reasoned himself into its propriety, but he 
would have reasoned himself out again. 
Gibbon ! Imagine its being put into the head 
of Gibbon ! ! He and his bag- wig would have 
started with all the horror of a gentleman- 
usher ; and he would have rung the bell for 
the cook's-deputy's-under-assistant-errand-boy. 
Cats at firesides live luxuriously, and are the 
picture of comfort ; but lest they should not 
bear their portion of trouble in this world, they 
have the drawbacks of being liable to be shut 



out of doors on cold nights, beatings from the 
u aggravated" cooks, overpettings of children, 
(how should we like to be squeezed and pulled 
about in that manner by some great patroniz- 
ing giants ?) and last, not least, horrible merci- 
less tramples of unconscious human feet and 
unfeeling legs of chairs. Elegance, comfort, 
and security seem the order of the day on all 
sides, and you are going to sit down to dinner, 
or to music, or to take tea, when all of a sudden 
the cat gives a squall as if she was mashed ; and 
you are not sure that the fact is otherwise. Yet 
she gets in the way again, as before ; and dares 
all the feet and mahogany in the room. Beau- 
tiful present sufficingness of a cat's imagina- 
tion ! Confined to the snug circle of her own 
sides, and the two next inches of rug or carpet. 



XL.— PUT UP A PICTURE IN YOUR 
ROOM. 

May we exhort such of our readers as have 
no pictures hanging in their room, to put one 
up immediately ? we mean in their principal 
sitting-room ; — in all their rooms, if possible, 
but, at all events, in that one. No matter how 
costly, or the reverse, provided they see some- 
thing in it, and it gives them a profitable or 
pleasant thought. Some may allege that they 
have " no taste for pictures ; " but they have 
a taste for objects to be found, in pictures, — for 
trees, for landscapes, for human beauty, for 
scenes of life ; or, if not for all these, yet 
surely for some one of them ; and it is highly 
useful for the human mind to give itself helps 
towards taking an interest in things apart 
from its immediate cares or desires. They 
serve to refresh us for their better conquest 
or endurance ; to render sorrow unselfish ; to 
remind us that we ourselves, or our own per- 
sonal wishes, are not the only objects in the 
world ; to instruct and elevate us, and put us 
in a fairer way of realizing the good opinions 
which we would all fain entertain of ourselves, 
and in some measure do ; to make us compare 
notes with other individuals, and with nature 
at large, and correct our infirmities at their 
mirror by modesty and reflection ; in short, 
even the admiration of a picture is a kind of 
religion, or additional tie on our consciences, 
and rebinding of us, (for such is the meaning of 
the word religion) to the greatness and good- 
ness of nature. 

Mr. Hazlitt has said somewhere, of the 
portrait of a beautiful female with a noble 
countenance, that it seems as if an unhand- 
some action would be impossible in its pre- 
sence. It is not so much for restraint's sake, 
as for the sake of diffusiveness of heart, or the 
going out of ourselves, that we would recom- 
mend pictures ; but, among other advantages, 
this also, of reminding us of our duties, would 
doubtless be one ; and if reminded with 



PUT UP A PICTURE IN YOUR ROOM. 



charity, the effect, though perhaps small in 
most instances, would still be something. We 
have read of a Catholic money-lender, who, 
when he was going to cheat a customer, 
always drew a veil over the portrait of his 
favourite Saint. Here was a favourite vice, 
far more influential than the favourite Saint ; 
and yet we are of opinion that the money- 
lender was better for the Saint than he would 
have been without him. It left him faith in 
something ; he was better for it in the inter- 
vals ; he would have treated his daughter the 
better for it, or his servant, or his dog. There 
was a bit of heaven in his room, — a sun-beam 
to shine into a corner of his heart, — however 
he may have shut the window against it, when 
heaven was not to look on. 

The companionship of anything greater or 
better than ourselves must do us good, unless 
we are destitute of all modesty or patience. 
And a picture is a companion, and the next 
thing to the presence of what it represents. 
We may live in the thick of a city, for in- 
stance, and can seldom go out, and "feed" 
ourselves 

With pleasure of the breathing fields ; 

but we can put up a picture of the fields before 
us, and, as we get used to it, we shall find it 
the next thing to seeing the fields at a distance. 
For every picture is a kind of window, which 
supplies us with a fine sight ; and many a 
thick, unpierced wall thus lets us into the 
studies of the greatest men, and the most 
beautiful scenes of nature. By living with 
pictures we learn to " read " them, — to see 
into every nook and corner of a landscape, 
and every feature of the mind ; and it is im- 
possible to be in the. habit of these perusals, 
or even of being vaguely conscious of the pre- 
sence of the good and beautiful, and consider- 
ing them as belonging to us, or forming a part 
of our common-places, without being, at the 
very least, less subject to the disadvantages 
arising from having no such thoughts at all. 

And it is so easy to square the picture to 
one's aspirations, or professions, or the powers 
of one's pocket. For, as to resolving to have 
no picture at all in one's room, unless we could 
have it costly, and finely painted, and finely 
framed, that would be a mistake so vulgar, 
that we trust no reader of any decent publica- 
tion now-a-days could fall into it. The greatest 
knave or simpleton in England, provided he is 
rich, can procure one of the finest paintings 
in the world to-morrow, and know nothing 
about it when he has got it ; but to feel the 
beauties of a work of art, or to be capable of 
being led to feel them, is a gift which often 
falls to the lot of the poorest ; and this is what 
Raphael or Titian desired in those who looked 
at their pictures. All the rest is taking the 
clothes for the man. Now it so happens, that 
the cheapest engravings, though they cannot 



come up to the merits of the originals, often 
contain no mean portion or shadow of them ; 
and when we speak of putting pictures up in 
a room, we use the word "picture" in the 
child's sense, meaning any kind of graphic 
representation, oil, water-colour, copper-plate, 
drawing, or wood-cut. And any one of these 
is worth putting up in your room, provided 
you have mind enough to get a pleasure from 
it. Even a frame is not necessary, if you 
cannot afford it. Better put up a rough, var- 
nished engraving, than none at all, — or pin, 
or stick up, any engraving whatsoever, at the 
hazard of its growing never so dirty. You 
will keep it as clean as you can, and for as 
long a time ; and as for the rest, it is better to 
have a good memorandum before you, and get 
a fresh one when you are able, than to have 
none at all, or even to keep it clean in a port- 
folio. How should you like to keep your own 
heart in a portfolio, or lock your friend up in 
another room ? We are no friends to port- 
folios, except where they contain more prints 
than can be hung up. The more, in that case, 
the beHer. 

Our readers have seen in all parts of the 
country, over the doors of public -houses, 
"Perkins and Co.'s Entire." This Perkins, 
who died wealthy a few years ago, was not a 
mere brewer or rich man. He had been head- 
clerk to Thrale, the friend of Dr. Johnson ; 
and, during his clerkship, the Doctor happen- 
ing to go into his counting-house, saw a por- 
trait of himself (Johnson) hanging up in it. 
"How is this, Sir ? " inquired Johnson. " Sir," 
said Perkins, " I was resolved that my room 
should have had one great man in it." " A very 
pretty compliment," returned the gratified 
moralist, " and I believe you mean it sincerely." 

Mr. Perkins did not thrive the worse for 
having the portrait of Johnson in his counting- 
house. People are in general quite enough 
inclined to look after the interests of " number 
one ;" but they make a poor business of it, rich as 
they may become, unless they include a power 
of forgetting it in behalf of number two ; that 
is to say, of some one person, or thing, besides 
themselves, able to divert them from mere 
self-seeking. It is not uncommon to see one 
solitary portrait in a lawyer's office, and that 
portrait, a lawyer's, generally some judge. It 
is better than none. Anything is better than 
the poor, small unit of a man's selfish self, 
even if it be but the next thing to it. And 
there is the cost of the engraving and frame. 
Sometimes there is more ; for these profes- 
sional prints, especially when alone, are meant 
to imply, that the possessor is a shrewd, indus- 
trious, proper lawyer, who sticks to his calling, 
and wastes his time in " no nonsense ; " and 
this ostentation of business is in some instances 
a cover for idleness or disgust, or a blind for a 
father or rich uncle. Now it would be better, 
i we think, to have two pictures instead of one, 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



the judge's by all means, for the professional 
part of the gentleman's soul, — and some one 
other picture, to show his client that he is a 
man as well as a lawyer, and has an eye to the 
world outside of him, as well as to his own ; 
for as men come from that world to consult him, 
and generally think their cases just in the 
eyes of common sense as well as law, they 
like to see that he has some sympathies as well 
as cunning. 

Upon these grounds, it would be well for 
men of other callings, if they acted in a similar 
way. The young merchant should reasonably 
have a portrait of some eminent merchant 
before his eyes, with some other, not far off, 
to hinder him from acknowledging no merit 
but in riches. Or he might select a merchant 
of such a character as could serve both uses, — 
Sir Thomas Gresham, for instance, who encou- 
raged knowledge as well as money-getting, — 
or Lorenzo de Medici, the princely merchant 
of Italy. So with regard to clergymen, to 
professions of all sorts, and to trade. The 
hosier, in honour of his calling, might set up 
Defoe, who was one of that trade, as well as 
author of Robinson Crusoe ; the bookseller, 
may the footman, Dodsley, who was at one 
time a footman as well as a bookseller and 
author, and behaved excellently under all 
characters ; and the tailor might baulk petty 
animadversions on his trade, by having a 
portrait, or one of the many admirable works, 
of the great Annibal Caracci, who was a 
tailor's son. It would be advisable, in gene- 
ral, to add a landscape, if possible, for reasons 
already intimated ; but a picture of some sort 
we hold to be almost indispensably necessary 
towards doing justice to the habitation of 
every one who is capable of reflection and 
improvement. The print-shops, the book- 
stalls, the portfolios containing etchings and 
engravings at a penny or twopence a-piece 
(often superior to plates charged twenty times 
as much), and lastly, the engravings that 
make their way into the shop-windows, out 
of the Annuals of the past season, and that 
are to be had for almost as little, will furnish 
the ingenuous reader of this article with an 
infinite store to choose from ; and if he is as 
good-natured as he is sensible, we will venture 
to whisper into his ear, that we should take it 
as a personal kindness of him, and hope he 
would consider us as a friend assisting him in 
putting it up. 



XLL— A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 

BEAUTIES OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES. 

Looking over the catalogue, the other day, 
of Mr. Cawthorn's excellent circulating library 
(which has the books it professes to have, — a 
rare virtue in such establishments) our curiosity 
was raised by a volume intitled " Beauties of St. 



Francis de Sales." We sent for it, and found 
we had started so delicious a saint, that we 
vowed we must make him known to our 
readers. He is a true godsend, a man of men, 
a real quintessence of Christian charity and 
shrewd sense withal (things not only far from 
incompatible, but thoroughly amalgamable) ; 
in short, a man as sensible as Dr. Johnson, 
with all the piety anjl patience which the 
Doctor desired to have, all the lowliness and 
kind fellowship which it would have puzzled 
him to behold in a prelate, and all the delicacy 
and true breeding which would have trans- 
ported him. Like Fenelon, he was a sort of 
angel of a gentleman, a species of phoenix 
which, we really must say, the French Church 
seems to have produced beyond any other. 
Not that we undervalue the Hookers and 
Jewels, and other primitive excellences of our 
own. Deeply do we love and venerate them. 
But we like to see a human being develop all 
the humanities of which he is capable, those 
of outward as well as inward elegance not 
excepted ; not indeed in the inconsistent and 
foppish shape of a Sir Charles Grandison (who 
comes hushing upon us with insinuations of 
equal perfection in dancing and the decalogue, 
with soft deprecations of our astonishment, 
and all sorts of equivocal worldly accomplish- 
ments, which the author has furnished him 
with, on purpose to keep his piety safe — 
swordsmanship, for one) but in whatsoever, 
being the true spirit of a gentleman, manifests 
itself outwardly in consequence, shaping the 
movements of the commonest and most super- 
ficial parts of life to the unaffected elegance of 
the spirit within, and at the same time refusing 
no fellowship with honesty of any sort, nor 
ostentatiously claiming it, but feeling and 
having it, because of its true, natural, honest 
heart's blood, and a tendency to relish all 
things in common with us, " passioned as we." 

When a man exhibits this nature, as St. 
Francis de Sales did, and exhibits it too in the 
shape of a mortified saint of the Romish 
Church, a lone lodger, a celibatory, entering 
into everybody else's wishes and feelings, but 
denying himself some of the most precious to 
a being so constituted, we feel proud for the 
sake of the capabilities of humanity — proud 
because we belong to a species which we are 
utterly unable to illustrate so in our own 
persons — proud, and happy, and hopeful that 
if one human being can do so much, thousands, 
nay all, by like opportunities, and a like loving 
breeding, may ultimately do, not indeed the 
same, but enough — enough for themselves, and 
enough for the like exalted natures, too, who 
have the luck to live in such times. 

Even if such times are not to come, but are 
merely among the fancies or necessary activi- 
ties of the human mind, then still we are 
grateful for the vision by the way, and, above 
all, for the exquisite real fellowship. 



6 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



We need not deprecate any ill construction 
of our use of the term "gentleman saint." In 
some sort, we do confess, we use it with a 
delighted smile on our face, astonished to start 
sucli a phenomenon in high life ; but while the 
conversational sense of the word is included, 
we claim for it, as we have explained, the 
very largest and truest sense. One of our 
brave old English dramatists, brave because 
his humanity misgave him in nothing, dared 
to call the divinest of beings that have trod 
the earth — 

" The first true gentleman that ever breathed." 

Here is another (at far distance) of the same 
heraldry, his shield — 

"heart shaped, and vermeil dyed." 

Fenelon was another, but not so active or 
persuasive as De Sales. St. Vincent de Paul, 
if Ave mistake not, the founder of the Sisters 
of Charity, was a fourth. So, we believe, was 
St. Thomas Aquinas. So, perhaps, was Jeremy 
Taylor, and certainly Berkeley — the latter, the 
more unquestionably of the two, because he 
was the more active in doing good, and mani- 
festly did not care twopence for honours and 
profits, compared with the chance of benefiting 
his fellow-creatures. At one time, for this 
purpose, he petitioned to give up his prefer- 
ments ! Swift has a pleasant passage in 
furtherance of this object, in which he tells 
the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, that Dr. 
Berkeley will be miserable in case he is not 
allowed to give up some hundreds a year. 

We will first give the " General Biographical 
Dictionary" account of St. Francis de Sales, 
and follow it with a notice of the book 
before us. 

" St. Francis de Sales was born at the Castle 
of Sales, in the diocese of Geneva, August 21, 
1567. He descended from one of the most 
ancient and noble families of Savoy. Having 
taken a doctor of law's degree at Padua, he 
was first advocate at Chambery, then provost 
of the church of Geneva at Annecy. Claudius 
de Granier, his bishop, sent him as a mission- 
ary into the valleys of his diocese, to convert 
the Zuinglians and Calvinists, which he is said 
to have performed in great numbers, (sic) and 
his sermons were attended with wonderful suc- 
cess. The bishop of Geneva chose him after- 
wards for his coadjutor, but was obliged to 
use authority before he could be persuaded to 
accept the office. Religious affairs called him 
afterwards into France, where he was univer- 
sally esteemed ; and Cardinal du Perron said, 
" There were no heretics whom he could not 
convince, but M. de Geneva must be employed 
to convert them." Henry IV., being informed 
of his merit, made him considerable offers, in 
hopes of detaining him in France ; but he 
chose rather to return to Savoy, where he 
arrived in 1602, and found Bishop Granier had 
died a few days before. St. Francis then 



undertook the reformation of his diocese, 
where piety and virtue soon flourished through 
his zeal : he restored regularity in the monas- 
teries, and instituted the order of the Visita- 
tion in 1610, which was confirmed by Paul V., 
1618, and of which the Baroness de Chantal, 
whom he converted by his preaching at Dijon, 
was the foundress. He also established a 
congregation of hermits in Chablais, restored 
ecclesiastical discipline to its ancient vigour, 
and converted numerous heretics to the faith. 
At the latter end of 1618, St. Francis was 
obliged to go again to Paris, with the Cardinal 
de Savoy, to conclude a marriage between the 
Prince of Piedmont and Christina of France, 
second daughter of Henry IV. This princess, 
herself, chose de Sales for her chief almoner ; 
but he would accept the place only on two 
conditions ; one, that it should not preclude 
his residing in his diocese ; the other, that 
whenever he did not execute his office, he 
should not receive the profits of it. These 
unusual terms the princess was obliged to 
consent to ; and immediately, as if by way of 
investing him with his office, presented him 
with a very valuable diamond, saying, ' On 
condition that you will keep it for my sake.* 
To which he replied, ' I promise to do so, 
madam, unless the poor stand in need of it.' 
Returning to Annecy, he continued to visit 
the sick, relieve those in want, instruct the 
people, and discharge all the duties of a pious 
bishop, till 1662 ; when he died of an apoplexy 
at Lyons, December 28, aged fifty-six, leaving 
several religious works, collected in 2 vols, 
folio. The most known are, the ' Introduction 
to a Devout Life,' and * Philo, or a treatise on 
the Love of God.' Marsollier has written his 
life, (2 vols. 12mo,) which was translated into 
English by Mr. Crathorne. He was canonized 
in 1665."— (Moreri.— Diet. Hist.— Butler.) 

The writers of this notice do not seem to 
have been aware, that Camus, Bishop of Bellay, 
the disciple and friend of St. Francis, wrote a 
large account of him, "the Beauties" of which 
the work before us professes to give the public. 
This English volume is itself a curiosity. It 
is printed at Barnet, and emanates most likely 
from some public-spirited enthusiast of the 
Roman Catholic persuasion, who has thought, 
not without reason, to sow a good seed in these 
strange, opinion-coDflicting, yet truth-desiring 
times, when a little genuine Christianity stands 
a chance of being well received, from what- 
ever quarter it comes. A friend of ours, 
smitten with love of the book, has applied for 
a copy at Messrs. Longman's, whose name is 
in the title page, but is told that they have 
not one left ; so that if the Barnet press do 
not take Christian pity upon the curious, we 
know not what is to be done for them, apart 
from the following extracts ; which, however, 
we take to be quite enough to set any hand- 
some mind upon salutary reflections. 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



Camus, the Boswell of a saint, is himself a 
curiosity. He was a man of wit and a satirist, 
and so far (in the latter respect) not very well 
fitted for ultra Christian aspiration. But he 
was also an enthusiastic lover of goodness, and 
of his great seraphical friend ; whom he looked 
up to with all the congregated humilities of a 
younger age, a real self-knowledge, and an 
unaffected modesty. He was naturally as 
hasty in his temperament as St. Francis was 
the reverse ; and was always for getting on 
too fast, and being angry that others would 
not be Christian enough ; and it is quite 
delightful to see with what sense and good- 
humour his teacher reproves him, and sets 
him in the right way ; upon which the young 
bishop begins over-emulating the older one 
(for they were both prelates together), trying 
to imitate his staid manners and deliberate 
style of preaching ; and then St. Francis 
reproves him again, joking as well as reason- 
ing, and showing how he was spoiling the 
style peculiar to himself (Camus), with no 
possibility of getting at the style of another 
man — the result of his habits and particular 
turn of mind. 

But let the reader see for himself what a 
nature this man had, — what wisdom with 
simplicity, what undeviating kindness, what 
shrewd worldly discernment with unworldly 
feelings ; what capital Johnsonian good sense, 
and wit too, and illustration, sometimes as 
familiar as any table-talk could desire, at others 
in the very depth of the heart of sentiment 
and poetical grace. Observe also what a proper 
saint he was for every-day, as well as for holi- 
days, and how he could sit down at table and 
be an ordinary unaffected gentleman among 
gentlemen, and dine at less elegant tables at 
inns, and say a true honest word, with not a 
syllable of pretence in it, for your hard-work- 
ing innkeeper, — " publican," and, perhaps, " sin- 
ner," as he was. 

" Beautiful are the ceremonies of the church ! " 
said a Roman Catholic prelate, when a great 
wax-candle was brought before him, stuck full 
of pieces of gold (his perquisite.) " Beautiful 
are the ceremonies of the church !" think we, 
also, though no Roman Catholic, when we 
hear the organ roll, and the choir voices rising, 
and see the white wax-candles on the altar, 
and the dark glowing paintings, full of hopeful 
or sweet-suffering faces. But most truly beauti- 
ful, certainly, must they have been, when they 
had such a man as this St. Francis de Sales 
ministering at the altar, and making those 
seraphical visions true, in the shape of an 
every-day human being. But to our ex- 
tracts : — 

" In speaking of brotherly correction (says 
the good Bishop Camus), St. Francis gave me 
a lesson which I have not forgotten. He 
repeated it often, the better to impress it on 
my memory. < That sincerity? said he, ' which is 



not charitable, proceeds from a charity which is not 
sincere. 9 A worthy saying, worthy of being 
deeply considered and faithfully remembered. 

" IT IS BETTER TO REMAIN SILENT THAN SPEAK THE TRUTH 
ILL-HUMOUREDLY, AND SO SPOIL AN EXCELLENT DISH BY 
COVERING IT WITH BAD SAUCE. 

u I asked St. Francis, if there were no other 
way by which I might discern from what 
fountain reproaches flowed. He, whose heart 
was wrapped up in benevolence, replied, in 
the true spirit of the great apostle, — ' When 
they are made with mildness — mildness is the 
sister of love, and inseparable from her. "With this 
idea St. Paul says, She beareth all things, 
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth 
all things. God, who is charity, guides the meek 
with his counsel, and teaches his ways to the 
simple. His spirit is not in the hurricane, the 
foaming cataract, or the tempestuous winds ; 
but in the soft breath of the gentle zephyr. 
Is mildness come ? said the prophet ; then are 
we corrected. I advise you to imitate the 
good Samaritan, who poured oil and wine into 
the wounds of the unhappy traveller. You 
know that in a good salad there should be more oil 
than vinegar or salt. Be always as mild as you 
can ; a spoonful of honey attracts more flies 
than a barrel of vinegar. If you must fall into 
any extreme, let it be on the side of gentleness. The 
human mind is so constructed, that it resists 
rigour, and yields to softness. A mild word 
quenches anger, as water quenches the rage of 
fire ; and by benignity any soil may be rendered 
fruitful. Truth, uttered with courtesy, is 
heaping coals of fire on the head ; or, rather, 

THROWING ROSES IN THE FACE. How Can We 

resist a foe whose weapons are pearls and diamonds! 
Some fruits, like nuts, are by nature bitter, 
but rendered sweet by being candied with 
sugar ; such is reproof, bitter till candied 
with meekness, and preserved with the fire 
of charity.' 

" St. Francis always discouraged professions of 
humility, if they were not very true and very 
sincere. ' Such professions,' he said, ' are the 
very cream, the very essence of pride ; the 
real humble man wishes to be, and not to 
appear so. Humility is timorous, and starts 
at her shadow ; and so delicate, that if she 
hears her name pronounced, it endangers her existence. 
He who blames himself, takes a by-road to 
praise ; and, like the rower, turns his back to 
the place whither he desires to go. He would 
be irritated if what he said against himself were 
believed ; but from a principle of pride, he 
desires to appear humble.' 

" I esteemed my friend (resumes excellent 
Camus) so highly, that all his actions appeared 
to me perfect. It came into my head that it 
would be a very good thing to copy his manner 
of preaching. Do not suppose that I attempted 
to equal him in the loftiness of his ideas, in 
the depth of his arguments, in the strength of 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



his reasonings, in the excellence of his judg- 
ment, the mildness of his expressions, the 
order and just connection of his periods, or 
that incomparable sweetness which could soften 
the hardest heart ; no, that was quite beyond 
my powers. I was like a fly, which, not being 
able to walk on the polished surface of a mir- 
ror, is contented to remain on the frame which 
surrounds it. I amused myself in copying his 
gesture, in conforming myself to his slow and 
quiet manner of pronouncing and moving. 
My own manner was naturally the very reverse 
of all this ; the metamorphosis was therefore so 
strange, that I was scarcely to be recognised. 
I was no longer myself. I contrived to spoil 
my own original manner, without acquiring 
the admirable one which I so idly copied. 

" St. Francis heard of this, and one day took 
an opportunity of saying to me — ' Speaking of 
sermons reminds me of a strange piece of news 
which has reached my ears. It is reported 
that you try, in preaching, to adopt the Bishop 
of Geneva's peculiarities.' I warded off this 
reproof by saying, ' And do you think I have 
chosen a bad example ? What is your opinion 
of the Bishop of Geneva's preaching ?' 'Ha!' 
said he, i this grave question attacks reputation. 
Why, he really does not preach badly ; but the 
fact is, that you are accused of being so bad a 
mimic, that nothing is to be seen but an unsuc- 
cessful attempt, which spoils the Bishop of Bellay, 
without representing the Bishop of Geneva. So that 
you ought to do as a bad painter did ; he 
wrote under his picture the name of the objects 
which they misrepresented.' ' Let them talk,' 
said I, ' and you will find that, by degrees, the 
apprentice will become master, and the copies 
be mistaken for originals.' ' Joking apart,' 
rejoined my friend, ' you do yourself an injury. 
Why demolish a well-built edifice to erect one 
in its stead in which no rules of nature or art 
are adhered to ? and at your age, if you once 
take a wrong bias, it will be difficult to set you 
right again. If natures coidd be exchanged, gladly 
would I exchange with you. I do all I can to 
rouse myself to animation. I try to be less tedious, 
but the more haste I make the more I impede my 
course. I have difficulty in finding words, and 
greater still in pronouncing them. I am as 
slow as a tortoise. I can neither raise emotion 
in myself nor in my auditors. All my labour 
to do so is inefficient. You advance with 
crowded sail, I make my way with rowing. 
You fly — I creep. You have more fire in one 
finger than I have in my whole body. Your 
readiness and promptitude are wonderful, your 
vivacity unequalled, and now people say you 
weigh each word, count every period, appear 
languid yourself, and weary your audience.' 
You may well imagine how this well-timed reproof 
and commendation cured my folly. I returned 
immediately to my original manner." — 

" l The best fish are nourished in the unpalat- 
able waters of the sea, and the best souls are 



improved by such opposition as does not extinguish 
charity.' 

" I asked St. Francis what disposition of mind 
was the best with which to meet death ? He 
coolly replied, < A charitable disposition! " — 

" Do not overrate the blessings which God 
gives to others, and then underrate or despise 
what are given to yourself. It is the property 
of a little mind to say, Our neighbour's harvest 
is always more plentiful than our own, and his 
flock more prosperous."— 

" I complained of some great hardships which 
I had experienced ; it was obvious that St. 
Francis agreed in thinking that I had been 
ill-treated. Finding myself so well seconded, 
/ was triumphant, and exaggerated the justice of 
my cause in a superfluity of words. To stop 
the torrent of complaint St. Francis said, 
i Certainly they are wrong in treating you in 
this manner. It is beneath them to do so, 
especially to a man in your condition ; but in 
the whole of the business I see only one thing 
to your disadvantage.' 'What is that?' ' That 
you might have been wiser, and remained silent!' 
This answer came so immediately home to me. 
that I felt immediately silenced, and found it 
impossible to make any reply." 

The following was a strange bit of super- 
erogation in the lively Bishop of Bellay. His 
candour hardly excuses it. Yet it increases 
our interest in his friend. 

" St. Francis practised himself the lessons 
which he taught to others ; and during four- 
teen years that I was under his direction, and 
made it my study to remark all his actions, 
and even his very gestures and words, I never 
observed in him the slightest affectation of 
singularity. I will confess one of my con- 
trivances when he visited me in my own house, 
and remained, as his custom was, a week 
annually : / contrived to bore holes, by which I saw 
him when alone, engaged in study, prayer, or 
reading, meditating, dressing, sitting, walking, 
or writing, when usually persons are most off 
their guard ; yet I could not trace any differ- 
ence in attitude or manner : his behaviour was 
ever as sincere and undisguised as his heart. 
He had, when alone, the same dignified man- 
ners as when in society ; when he prayed, you 
woidd have imagined that he saw himself surrounded 
by holy angels ; motionless, and with a counte- 
nance of humble reverence. I never saw him 
indulge in any indolent attitude (!), neither 
crossing his legs, nor resting his head on his 
hand ; at all times he presented the same 
aspect of mingled gravity and sweetness, 
which never failed to inspire love and respect. 
He used to say, that our manners should resemble 
water, best when clearest, most simple, and without 
taste. However, though he had no peculiarities 
of behaviour, it appeared so singular that he 
should have no singularities, that he struck 
me therefore as very singular." — 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



" WILLINGLY, NOT BY CONSTRAINT. 

" This was my friend's favourite saying, and 
the secret of his government. He used to say 
that those who would force the human will 
exercise a tyranny odious to God. He never 
could bear those haughty persons who would 
be obeyed, whether willingly or not, they cared 
not ; ' Those,' he said, ' who love to be feared, 
fear to be loved ; they themselves are of all 
peoplethemost abject ; some fearthem, but they 
fear every one. In the royal galley of Divine 
Love there is no force — the rowers are all volunteers? 
On this principle he always moulded his com- 
mands into the softer form of entreaty. St. 
Peter's words — ' Feed the flock of God, not by 
constraint,' he was very fond of. I complained 
of the resistance I met with in my parochial 
visits. ' What a commanding spirit you 
have !' he replied ; ' you want to walk on the 
wings of the wind, and you let yourself be 
carried away with zeal. Like an ignis-fatuus, 
it leads to the edge of precipices. I)o you seek 
to shackle the will of man, when God has seen fit to 
have it free V — 

" St. Francis did not approve of the saying — 
e Never rely on a reconciled enemy.' He 
rather preferred a contrary maxim ; and said, 
* that a quarrel between friends, when made 
up, added a new tie to friendship ; as experience 
shows, that the callosity formed round a broken bone 
makes it stronger than before. Those who are 
reconciled, often renew their friendship with 
increased warmth : the offender is on his guard 
against a relapse, and anxious to atone for past un- 
kindness ; and the offended glory in forgiving and 
forgetting the wrongs that have been done to them. 
Princes are doubly careful of reconquered towns, and 
preserve them with more care than those the enemy 
never gained? — 

" St. Francis had particular delight in contem- 
plating a painting of the Penitent Magdalen at 
the foot of the Cross ; and sometimes called it 
his manual and his library. Seeing a copy of 
this picture at Bellay, ' Oh,' said he, ' what a 
blessed and advantageous exchange the peni- 
tent Mary made ; she pours tears on the feet 
of Christ, and from those feet blood streams to 
wash away all her sins.' To this thought he 
added another — i How carefully we should 
cherish the little virtues which spring up at the foot of 
the cross, since they are sprinkled with the 
blood of the Son of God.' 

" 'What virtues do you mean ?' He replied, 
' Humility, patience, meekness, benignity, 
bearing one another's burden, condescension, 
softness of heart, cheerfulness, cordiality, com- 
passion, forgiving injuries, simplicity, candour ; 
all, in short, of that sort. They, like unobtrusive 
violets, love the shade ; like them are sustained by 
dew ; and though, like them, they make little show, 
they shed a sweet odour on all around? — 

" To obey a ferocious, savage, ill-humoured, 
thankless master, is to draw clear water from a 



fountain streaming from the jaws of a brazen lion. 
As Samson says. It is to find food in the 
devourer. It is to see God only." [This is 
beautiful ; and that is a fine bit of poetry about 
the lion ; strength and sweetness meet in it. 
He is speaking of a master whom it happens 
to be incumbent on us to obey.] 

" St. Francis highly esteemed those persons 
who kept inns, and entertained travellers*, 
provided they were civil and obliging, saying, 
that no condition in life, he thought, had 
greater means of serving God and man ; for it 
is a continual exercise of benevolence and 
mercy, though, like a physician, the fee is paid." 

[How oddly the following sounds in a Pro- 
testant ear, said of a " St. Francis ! "] 

" One day, after dinner, my friend was amus- 
ing us with his entertaining conversation, and the 
subject of innkeepers being accidentally started, 
the different persons present very freely gave 
their opinions on the subject, and one among 
them declared the whole set to be rogues. 

" This did not please St. Francis ; but as it 
was neither a fit time nor place for reproof, nor 
was the sarcastic gentleman in a mood to receive 
it, he turned the discourse by telling the 
following anecdote : — 

"A Spanish pilgrim, little burdened with 
money, arrived at an inn, where, after having 
served him very ill, they charged him so much 
for his bad fare, that he loudly exclaimed at 
the injustice. However, being the weaker one, 
he was forced to give way and be satisfied. 
He left the inn in anger, and observing that it 
was facing another inn, and that in the inter- 
mediate space a cross had been erected, he 
soothed his rage by exclaiming, Truly, this 
place is a second Calvary, where the Holy 
Cross is stationed between two thieves (mean- 
ing the two innkeepers). The host of the oppo- 
site hotel, without appearing to notice his 
displeasure, coolly asked what injury he had 
received from him, which he thus repaid with 
abuse? Hush, hush, said the pilgrim, my 
worthy friend, be not offended, you are the good 
thief; but what say you of your neighbour, who 
has flayed me alive ! This civility,' pursued 
St. Francis, ' soothed the pilgrim's wrath ; but 
we should be careful not to stigmatise whole 
nations or trades, by terming them rogues, im- 
pertinent, &c, for even if we have no individual 
in view, each individual of the nation or trade 
is a sufferer by the sarcasm, and cannot like to 
be so stigmatised.' 

"To this I must add, that St. Francis so highly 
esteemed innkeepers, that, in travelling, he for- 
bade his servants to dispute about their charges, 
and ordered them rather to pay than to expos- 
tulate ; and when told that the bills were 
unreasonable, and that they asked more than 

* The reader is to bear in mind that these were foreign 
inns, and in old times, when a tavern-keeper's life was 
not so easy as it is now. 



10 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



they deserved, he would reply, ' What ought 
we to reckon in the account for their trouble, 
care, civility, and frequent disturbances at 
night ? Certainly they cannot be too well 
paid.' This good-nature of my friend was so 
well known, that the innkeepers were always 
anxious to present their bills to him rather 
than to his servants ; or else to throw them- 
selves on his liberality, well knowing that he 
would give more than they could have asked." 

POORNESS IN SPIRIT, AND SPIRIT IN POVERTY. 

Of these we have two opposite examples in 
St. Charles Borromeo and St. Francis de Sales. 
St. Charles was nephew to the pope, and very 
wealthy ; he had an income of more than 
100,000 crowns, besides his considerable patri- 
mony ; but, amidst this wealth, he was poor in 
spirit, he had neither tapestry, plate, nor mag- 
nificent furniture : — his table was so frugal, as 
to be almost austere ; and he himself lived 
chiefly on bread, water, and vegetables. The 
coflers which contained his treasures were the 
hands of the poor ; thus in splendour was he 
humble. 

Our saint had a different spirit : he was rich 
in his poverty ; of his bishopric little remained to 
him, and his patrimony he let his brothers enjoy. 
But he never rejected tapestry, plate, nor tine 
furniture, especially what might adorn the 
altar, for he loved to adorn the house of God. 

THOROUGH LOVE. 

" We cannot deny that love is, of all mild 
emotions, the mildest — the very sweetener of 
bitterness — yet we find it compared to death 
and the grave ; the reason of which is, that 
nothing is so forcible as gentleness, and nothing 
so gentle and so amiable as firmness. 

" There was a society of holy men," said St. 
Francis, ."who one day accosted me thus, — 
' Oh, sir, what can we do this year ? Last year 
we failed, and did penance thrice a week ; 
what shall we do now ? Must we not do some- 
thing more, both to testify our gratitude for 
the blessings we have received during the last 
year, and also that we may make some progress 
in the work of God?' 

" ' Very right,' I replied, ' that you should 
always be advancing ; however, your progress 
will not be made by the methods you propose 
— of increasing your religious exercises — but 
by the improved heart and dispositions with 
which you afford them, trusting in God more 
and more, and watching yourselves more and 
more. Last year you fasted three days in 
each week ; if you double the number of fasts 
this year, every day will be a day of abstinence, 
and the year following what will you do ? — you will 
be obliged, to make weeks of nine days long, or else to 
fast each day twice over? " 

[Here follows a strong and apparently a 
dangerous meat : yet the essence of sweetness, 
and even of safety, is in it. But pray ever mark 



our bold and admirable, as well as amiable, 
saint.] 

" I do not know," said St. Francis, " how that 
poor virtue, prudence, has offended me, but I 
cannot cordially like it — I care for it by necessity, 
as being the salt and lamp of life. The beauty 
of simplicity charms me — / would give a hundred 
serpents for one dove. Both together, they are 
useful, and Scripture enjoins us to unite them; 
but, as in medical compounds, many drugs 
must be put together toform a salutary draught, 
so I would not place any reliance on an equal 
dose ; for the serpent might devour the inoffensive 
dove. People say, that in a corrupt age like 
the present, prudence is absolutely requisite to 
prevent being deceived. / do not blame this 
maxim, but I believe it is more Christian to let 
ourselves be devoured, and our goods spoiled, 
knowing that a better and more lasting inhe- 
ritance awaits us. A good Christian would 
rather be robbed than rob others — rather be 
murdered than murderer — martyred than 
tyrant ; — in a word it is far better to be good 
and simple, than shrewd and mischievous." — 

" There is a strange inconsistency in the 
human mind, which leads men to scrutinise 
with severity the secrets of their fellow-crea- 
tures' souls, which it is impossible they should ever 
clearly discover; while they neglect to examine 
and probe into the springs of their own conduct, 
which, if they do not, they certainly ought to 
know. The first they are forbidden, and the 
second they are commanded to do. 

" This reminds me of a woman remarkable 
for her waywardness, and constant disobedience 
to the orders of her husband. She was 
drowned in a river. On hearing of it, her hus- 
band desired that the river should be dragged 
in search of the body ; he bid his servants go 
against the current of the stream, observing, We 
have no reason to suppose that she should have lost 
her spirit of contradiction." — 

St. Francis gave an excellent rule, which is, 
that " if an action may be considered in more lights 
than one, ahoays to choose the most favourable. If 
there is no apology to be found, soften the bad 
impression it makes, by reflecting that the in- 
tention might not have been equally blameable ; 
remember that the temptation might have 
been greater than you are aware of. Throw 
the odium on ignorance, carelessness, or the 
infirmity of human nature, to diminish the 
scandal."— 

" True devotion consists in performing the 
duties of life. St. Francis was in the habit of 
blaming an inconsistency very common in per- 
sons more than ordinarily devout, who fre- 
quently turn their attention to the attainment 
of virtues of no use to them in their own sphere of 
action, and neglect the more needful. This in- 
consistency he attributed to a distaste, which 
people often experience for the station in which 
Providence has placed them, and the duties 
they are obliged to perform. Great laxity of 



A GENTLEMAN-SAINT. 



manner creeps into monasteries, when their 
inmates devote themselves to the practice of 
virtues fitted for secular life ; and errors are 
not less likely to make their way into private 
families, who, from a mistaken and ill-judged 
zeal, introduce among themselves the austeri- 
ties and religious exercises of their secluded 
brethren. 

" Some persons think they pronounce the 
highest eulogium in saying of a family who 
ought to perform the active charities of life, ' it 
is quite a monastery ; they live in it like monks 
or nuns :' not reflecting that it is trying to find 
figs on thorns, or grapes on brambles. 

" Not that exercises of piety are not right and 
good, but then the time, the place, the persons, 
the situation ; in short, all circumstances must 
be duly considered. Devotion misplaced ceases 
to be devotion : it resembles a fish out of water, 
or a tree in a soil not congenial to its nature. 

" He compared this error of judgment, so 
unreasonable and injudicious, to those lovers of 
luxury who feed on strawberries at Christmas, not 
contented with delicacies in their proper sea- 
son. Such heated brains require the physician's 
discipline rather than the cool voice of sober reason." 

AN ADMIRABLE RULE IN SELF-CORRECTION FOR 
MORBID OR VIOLENT CONSCIENCES. 

" Since the degree of affection which we are 
commanded by God to feel for our neighbours 
ought to be measured by the reasonable and 
Christian love which we bear towards our- 
selves ; since charity, which is benign and 
patient, obliges us to correct our neighbours 
for their failings with great gentleness ; it does 
not appear right to alter that temper in cor- 
recting ourselves, or to recover from a fault, 
with feelings of bitter and intemperate dis- 
pleasure." 

SCALE OF VIRTUES. 

" 1st. St. Francis preferred the virtues most fre- 
quently called into action — the commonest ; and to 
exercise which, opportunities are oftenest 
found. 

" 2ndly, He did not judge of the greatness and 
supernatural excellence of a virtue by an 
external demonstration ; forasmuch as what 
appears a mere trifle may proceed from an ex- 
alted sentiment of charity and great assisting 
grace ; while, on the contrary, great show may 
exist where the love of God operates but 
slightly, though that is the criterion by which 
we may judge whether or not a good work be- 
comes acceptable to God. 

" 3rdly. He preferred the virtues of more 
general influence, rather than those more 
limited in their good effects (the love of God 
excepted). For example, he preferred prayer, 
as the star which gives light to every other ex- 
cellence ; piety, which sanctifies all our actions 
to the glory of God ; humility, from which we 
have a lowly opinion of ourselves and our 
actions ; meekness, which yields to the will of 



others ; and patience, which teaches us to 
suffer all things : rather than magnanimity, 
munificence, or liberality ; because they embrace 
fewer objects, and their influence is less generally felt 
on the heart and temper. 

" 4thly. He was often inclined to doubt the 
use of dazzling qualities, because by their bril- 
liancy they gave an opening to vain-glory, the 
bane of all intrinsic worth. 

" 5thly. He blamed those who never set any 
value on virtues till they gained the sanction 
of fashion (a very bad judge of such merchan- 
dize) ; thus preferring ostensible to spiritual 
benevolence ; fasting, penances, corporeal 
austerities, to gentleness, modesty, and self- 
government, which are of infinitely more value. 

" 6thly. He also reproved those who would 
not seek to obtain any virtues which were un- 
suited to their inclinations, to the neglect of 
what their duties more particularly required, 
serving God as it pleased themselves, and not 
in the manner which he commands. So common 
is this error, that a great number of persons, 
some very devout, suffer themselves to fall into 
it." 

WE MAY BE VERY REGULAR IN DEVOTION AND VERY 
WICKED ! 

" ' Do not deceive yourself,' said my friend ; 
6 it is not impossible to be very devout, and yet 
very wicked.' l Very hypocritical,' I replied, 
* and not sincerely pious.' i No ; I speak of in- 
tentional devotion.' This enigma appearing to 
me inexplicable, I begged he would explain 
his meaning more clearly. ' Devotion of self 
and of nature,' he answered, 4 is only a morally 
acquired virtue, and not a heavenly one assisted 
by grace ; otherwise it would be theological, 
which certainly it is not. It is a quality subor- 
dinate to what is termed religion ; or, as some 
say, it is only one of its effects, or fruits, as re- 
ligion is in itself subordinate to that one of the 
cardinal virtues called justice, or righteousness. 

(i ' You well know that all moral virtues, and 
also faith and hope, which are theological, may 
subsist with sin. They are then without form 
or life, being deprived of charity, which is their 
substance, their soul, and on which all their power 



" I lamented bitterly to St. Francis of the 
very hard treatment which I had received. ' To 
any other person,' he said, ' I should apply the 
unction of consolation, but the consideration of 
your situation in life, and the sincerity of my 
affection for you, render any such expression 
of affection needless. Pity would inflame the 
wound you have received. I shall, therefore, 
throw vinegar and salt upon it.' [Is not this af- 
fected cruelty, and truly flattering candour, 
admirable ?] 

"You said that it required amazing and well- 
tried patience to bear such an insult in silence." 

" ' Certainly ; yours cannot be of a very fine 
temperament, since you complain so loudly.' 

" But it is only in your friendly bosom, in the 



12 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



ear of your affection, that I pour out my sor- 
rows. To whom should a child turn for com- 
passion, but to a kind parent ?" 

"* Oh, you babe! Is it fit, do you suppose, for 
one who occupies a lofty station in the church 
of Christ, to encourage himself in such child- 
ishness % When I was a child, said St. Paul, I 
spake as a child ; but when I became a man, I 
put away childish things. The imperfect articu- 
lation, so engaging in an infant, becomes an imperfec- 
tion if continued in riper years. Do you wish to 
be fed with milk and pap, instead of solid food ? 
Have you not teeth to masticate bread, even 

THE BITTER BREAD OF GRIEF ? 

"' What ! can you delight in bearing on your 
breast a golden cross, and then let your heart 
sink beneath the weight of slight affliction, and 
pour out bitter lamentations ? ' " 

WE ARE APT TO GIVE THE NAME OF CALUMNY TO 
UNPLEASANT BUT WHOLESOME TRUTHS. 

" Have patience with all things, but chiefly have 
patience with yourself. Do not lose courage 
in considering your own imperfections, but in- 
stantly set about remedying them ; — every day 
begin the task anew. The best method of attain- 
ing to Christian perfection is to be aware that 
you have not yet reached it ; but never to be 
weary of re-commencing. For, in the first 
place, how can you patiently bear your brothers 
burden, if you tcill not bear your own ? 

" Secondly. How can you reprove any one 
with gentleness, when you correct yourself with 
asperity ? 

" Thirdly. Whosoever is overcome witha sense 
of his faults, will not be able to subdue them : 
correction, to answer a good end, must proceed 
from a tranquil and thoughtful mind." — He 
means a mind made tranquil by its own con- 
sciousness of good intention, and a mild con- 
sideration of what is best. 

Erasmus said, that when he considered the 
life and doctrines of Socrates, he was inclined 
to exclaim "Sancte Socrates, or a pro nobis" (Saint 
Socrates, pray for us) ; that is, to put him in 
the saintly and Christian calendar. We do 
not live under a Catholic dispensation ; but, 
certainly, while reading this book, we have 
been inclined to exclaim, "Would to God there 
were but one Christian church, and such men 
as Saint Francis de Sales were counted saints 
by everybody ; — not to be imitated by them 
in by-gone, ascetical customs, much less in 
opinions that must have perplexed such natures 
more than any others, but in the ever-living 
necessities of charity and good faith, and the 
hope that such a church may come. And it 
may, and we believe will ; for utility itself will 
find it indispensable, — to say nothing of those 
indestructible faculties of man, that are ne- 
cessary to render utility itself beautiful and 
useful. If earth is to be made smoother, 
most assuredly the sky cannot be left out of 
its consideration, nor will appear less lovely ; 



and we never see an old quiet village church 
among the trees, under a calm heaven, — such 
as that, for instance, of Finchley or Hendon, — 
without feeling secure that such a time will 
arrive, with " Beauties" such as those of St. 
Francis de Sales preached in it, and congrega- 
tions who have really discovered that " God is 
love." 



XLIL— THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 

The reader should give us three pearls, in- 
stead of three half-pence *, for this number of 
our publication, for it presents him with the 
whole of Mr. Keats's beautiful poem, entitled as 
above, — to say nothing of our loving commen- 
tary. 

St. Agnes was a Roman virgin, who suffered 
martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian. Her 
parents, a few days after her decease, are said 
to have had a vision of her, surrounded by 
angels, and attended by a white lamb, which 
afterwards became sacred to her. In the 
Catholic church formerly the nuns used to 
bring a couple of lambs to her altar during 
mass. The superstition is, (for we believe it is 
still to be found) that by taking certain mea- 
sures of divination, damsels may get a sight of 
their future husbands in a dream. The ordi- 
nary process seems to have been by fasting. 
Aubrey (as quoted in " Brand's Popular Anti- 
quities") mentions another, which is, to take a 
row of pins, and pull them out one by one, say- 
ing a Pater-noster ; after which, upon going to 
bed, the dream is sure to ensue. Brand quotes 
Ben Jonson : — 

" And on sweet St. Agnes' night, 
Please you with the promised sight — 
Some of husbands, some of lovers, 
Which an empty dream discovers." 

But another poet has now taken up the creed 
in good poetic earnest ; and if the superstition 
should go out in every other respect, in his 
rich and loving pages it will live for ever. 

THE EVE OP ST. AGNES. 

BY JOHN KEATS. 
I. 

St. Agnes Eve — Ah ! bitter chill it was ; 
The owl, for all his feathers, was a -cold : 
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen 
And silent was the flock in woolly fold ; [grass, 
Numb were the beadsman's fingers while he told 
His rosary, and while his frosted breath, 
Like pious incense, from a censer old, 
Seem'd taking flight for heaven without a death, 
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer 
he saith. 

What a complete feeling of winter-time is 
here, together with an intimation of those 

* The price of the Journal in which the article first 
appeared. 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



13 



Catholic elegances, of which we are to have 
more in the poem ! 

" The owl with all his feathers was a-cold." 

Could he have selected an image more warm 
and comfortable in itself, and, therefore, better 
contradicted by the season ? We feel the plump, 
feathery bird in his nook, shivering in spite of 
his natural household warmth, and staring out 
at the strange weather. The hare limping 
through the chill grass is very piteous, and 
the " silent flock" very patient; and how quiet 
and gentle, as well as winterly, are all these 
circumstances, and fit to open a quiet and 
gentle poem ! The breath of the pilgrim, 
likened to "pious incense," completes them, 
and is a simile in admirable " keeping," as the 
painters call it ; that is to say, is thoroughly 
harmonious in itself, and with all that is going 
on. The breath of the pilgrim is visible, so 
is that of a censer ; his object is religious, 
and so is the use of the censer ; the censer, 
after its fashion, may be said to pray, and its 
breath, like the pilgrim's, ascends to heaven. 
Young students of poetry may, in this image 
alone, see what imagination is, under one of 
its most poetical forms, and how thoroughly it 
"tells." There is no part of it unfitting. It is 
not applicable in one point, and the reverse in 
another. 

ir. 
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man, 
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, 
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, 
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees : 
The sculptured dead on each side seem'd to freeze, 
Imprisoned in black purgatorial rails : 
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, 
He passeth by ; and his weak spirit fails 
To think how Lheymay ache in icy hoods and mails. 

The germ of this thought, or something like 
it, is in Dante, where he speaks of the figures 
that perform the part of sustaining columns 
in architecture. Keats had read Dante in 
Mr. Cary's translation, for which he had a 
great respect. He began to read him after- 
wards in Italian, which language he was mas- 
tering with surprising quickness. A friend of 
ours has a copy of Ariosto, containing admiring 
marks of his pen. But the same thought 
may have originally struck one poet as well :; 
as another. Perhaps there are few that have 
not felt something like it, in seeing the figures 
upon tombs. Here, however, for the first time, 
we believe, in English poetry, is it expressed, 
and with what feeling and elegance ! Most 
wintery as well as penitential is the word 
" aching" in " icy hoods and mails," and most 
felicitous the introduction of the Catholic idea 
in the word "purgatorial." The very colour 
of the rails is made to assume a meaning, 
and to shadow forth the gloom of the punish- 
ment — 

" Imprison'd in black purgatorial rails." 



Northward he turneth through a little door, 
And scarce three steps, ere music's golden tongue 
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor ; 
But no ; already had his death-bell rung ; 
The joys of all his life were said and sung : 
His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve : 
Another way he went, and soon among 
Rough ashes sat he, for his soul's reprieve ; 
And all night kept awake, for sinner's sake to 
grieve. 

" Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor." 

This " flattered " is exquisite. A true poet 
is by nature a metaphysician ; far greater in 
general than metaphysicians professed. He 
feels instinctively what the others get at by 
long searching. In this word "flattered" is 
the whole theory of the secret of tears ; which 
are the tributes, more or less worthy, of self- 
pity to self-love. Whenever we shed tears, 
we take pity on ourselves ; and we feel, if we 
do not consciously say so, that we deserve to 
have the pity taken. In many cases, the pity 
is just, and the self-love not to be construed 
unhandsomely. In many others, it is the 
reverse ; and this is the reason why selfish 
people are so often found among the tear- 
shedders, and why they seem even to shed 
them for others. They imagine themselves in 
the situation of the others, as indeed the most 
generous must, before they can sympathise ; 
but the generous console as well as weep. 
Selfish tears are niggardly of everything but 
themselves. 

"Flatter'd to tears." Yes, the poor old man 
was moved by the sweet music to think that 
so sweet a thing was intended for his comfort 
as well as for others. He felt that the mys- 
terious kindness of heaven did not omit even 
his poor, old, sorry case in its numerous work- 
ings and visitations ; and, as he wished to 
live longer, he began to think that his wish 
was to be attended to. He began to consider 
how much he had suffered — how much he 
had suffered wrongly or mysteriously — and 
how much better a man he was, with all his 
sins, than fate seemed to have taken him for. 
Hence he found himself deserving of tears 
and self-pity, and he shed them, and felt 
soothed by his poor, old, loving self. Not un- 
deservedly either ; for he was a pains-taking 
pilgrim, aged, patient, and humble, and wil- 
lingly suffered cold and toil for the sake of 
something better than he could otherwise 
deserve ; and so the pity is not exclusively 
on his own side : we pity him too, and would 
fain see him well out of that cold chapel, 
gathered into a warmer place than a grave. 
But it was not to be. We must, therefore, 
console ourselves with knowing, that this 
icy endurance of his was the last, and that 
he soon found himself at the sunny gate of 
heaven. 



14 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



That ancient beadsman heard the prelude soft, 
And so it chanced (for many a door was wide 
From hurry to and fro) soon up aloft 
The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide ; 
The level chambers, ready with their pride, 
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests : 
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, 
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, 
With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on 
their breasts. 



At length burst in the argent revelry, 
With plume, tiara, and all rich array, 
Numerous as shadows haunting fairily 
The brain, new stuff 'd,in youth, with triumphs gay 
Of old romance. These let us wish away, 
And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there, 
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, 
On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care, 
As she had heard old dames full many times de- 
clare. 

VI. 

They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve, 
Young virgins might have visions of delight ; 
And soft adorings from their loves receive 
Upon the honey' d middle of the night, 
If ceremonies due they did aright ; 
As, supperless to bed they must retire, 
And couch supine their beauties, lily white ; 
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require 
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they de- 



Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline ; 
The music, yearning like a god in pain, 
She scarcely heard ; her maiden eyes divine 
Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train 
Pass by — she heeded not at all ; in vain 
Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier, 
And back retired ; not cool'd by high disdain ; 
But she saw not ; her heart was otherwhere ; 
She sigh'd for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the 
year. 

VIII. 

She danced along with vague, regardless eyes, 
Anxious her lips,. her breathing quick and short; 
The hallow' d hour was near at hand ; she sighs 
Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort 
Of whisperers, in anger or in sport ; 
'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn ; 
Hood-winked with faery fancy ; all amort, 
Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn, 
And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn. 



So, purposing each moment to retire, 
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors, 
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire 
For Madeline. Beside the portal doors, 
Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and im- 
plores 
All saints to give him sight of Madeline, 
But for one moment in the tedious hours, 
That he might gaze, and worship all unseen, 
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss — in sooth such 
things have been. 



He ventures in ; let no buzz'd whisper tell ; 
All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords 
Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel. 
For him those chambers held barbarian hordes, 
Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords, 
Whose very dogs would execrations howl 
Against his lineage. Not one breast affords 
Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, 
Save one old beldame weak in body and in soul. 



Ah, happy chance ! the aged creature came 
Shuffling along with ivory headed wand, 
To where he stood, hid from the torches' flame, 
Behind a broad hall-pillar, far beyond 
The sound of merriment and chorus bland. 
He startled her ; but soon she knew his face, 
And grasp'd his fingers in her palsied hand : 
Saying, " Mercy, Porphyro ! hie thee from this 
place ; 
They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty 



tl Get hence ! Get hence ! there's dwarfish Hilde- 
He had a fever late, and in the fit [brand, 

He cursed thee and thine, both house and land : 
Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit 
More tame for his grey hairs — Alas, me ! flit ; 
Flit like a ghost away." — " Ah, gossip dear, 
We're safe enough ; here in this arm-chair sit, 
And tell me how — " — " Good Saints ! not here ! 

not here ! 
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy 

bier." 

xi r i. 
He follow'd through a lowly, arched way, 
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume ; 
And as she mutter'd " Well-a — well-a-day !" 
He found him in a little moonlight-room, 
Pale, latticed, chill, and silent as a tomb. 
" Now tell me where is Madeline," said he, 
" Oh, tell me, Angela, by the holy loom 
Which none but secret Sisterhood may see, 
When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously." 

The poet does not make his "little moon- 
light room" comfortable, observe. The high 
taste of the exordium is kept up. All is still 
wintery. There is to be no comfort in the 
poem but what is given by love. All else 
may be willingly left to the cold walls. 



« St. Agnes ! Ah ! it is St. Agnes' Eve- 
Yet men will murder upon holy days ; 
Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve, 
And be the liege-lord of all elves and fays 
To venture so : it fills me with amaze 
To see thee, Porphyro ! — St. Agnes' Eve ! 
God's help ! my lady fair the conjuror plays 
This very night : good angels her deceive ! 
But let me laugh awhile ; I've mickle time to 
grieve." 

xv. 
Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon, 
While Porphyro upon her face doth look, 
Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone, 
Who keepeth closed a wondrous riddle-book, 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



15 



As spectacled she sits in chimney nook ; 
But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told 
His lady's purpose ; and he scarce could brook 
Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold, 
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old. 

He almost shed tears of sympathy, to think 
how his treasure is exposed to the cold — and 
of delight and pride to think of her sleeping 
beauty, and her love for himself. This passage 
" asleep in the lap of legends old " is in the 
highest imaginative taste, fusing together the 
tangible and the spiritual, the real and the fan- 
ciful, the remote and the near. Madeline is 
asleep in her bed ; but she is also asleep in 
accordance with the legends of the season ; and 
therefore the bed becomes their lap as well as 
sleep's. The poet does not critically think 
of all this ; he feels it : and thus should other 
young poets draw upon the prominent points 
of their feelings on a subject, sucking the 
essence out of them into analogous words, 
instead of beating about the bush for thoughts, 
and, perhaps, getting very clever ones, but 
confused — not the best, nor any one better 
than another. Such, at least, is the difference 
between the truest poetry and the degrees 
beneath it. 

XVI. 

Sudden a thought came, like a full-blown rose, 
Flushing his brow ; and in his pained heart 
Made purple riot ; then doth he propose 
A stratagem, that makes the beldame start. 
" A cruel man, and impious, thou art : 
Sweet lady ! let her pray, and sleep, and dream, 
Alone with her good angels, far apart 
From wicked men like thee. Go ! go ! — I deem 
Thou canst not, surely, be the same that thou 
dost seem." 

XVII. 

" I will not harm her, by all saints I swear," 
Quoth Porphyro : " Oh, may I ne'er find grace, 
When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer, 
If one of her soft ringlets I displace, 
Or look with ruffian-passion in her face : 
Good Angela, believe me, by these tears, 
Or I will, even in a moment's space, 
Awake with horrid shout my foemen's ears, 
And beard them, though they be more fang'd than 
wolves and bears." 



" Ah ! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul ? 
A poor, weak palsy-stricken church-yard thing, 
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll ; 
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening, 
Were never miss'd ?" Thus, plaining, doth she 

bring 
A gentler speech from burning Porphyro ; 
So woeful and of such deep sorrowing, 
That Angela gives promise she will do 
Whatever he shall wish, betide or weal or woe ; 



Which was, to lead him in close secrecy, 
Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide 
Him in a closet, of such privacy 
That he might see her beauty unespied, 



And win perhaps that night a peerless bride ; 
While legion'd fairies paced the coverlet, 
And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed. 
Never on such a night have lovers met, 
Since Merlin paid his demon all the monstrous 
debt. 

What he means by Merlin's "monstrous 
debt," we cannot say. Merlin, the famous 
enchanter, obtained King Uther his interview 
with the fair Iogerne ; but though he was the 
son of a devil, and conversant with the race, 
we are aware of no debt that he owed them. 



u It shall be as thou wishest," said the dame j 
11 All cates and dainties shall be stored there, 
Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame 
Her own lute thou wilt see : no time to spare, 
For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare 
On such a catering trust my dizzy head ; 
Wait here, my child, with patience ; kneel in 

prayer 
The while : ah ! thou must needs the lady wed : 
Or may I never leave my grave among the dead." 



So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear ; 
Tlie lover's endless minutes slowly pass'd, 
The dame return'd, and whisper'd in his ear 
To follow her ; with aged eyes aghast 
From fright of dim espial. Safe at last, 
Through many a dusky gallery, they gain 
The maiden's chamber, silken, hush'd, and chaste, 
Where Porphyro took covert, pleased amain : 
His poor guide hurried back with agues in her 
brain. 

XXII. 

Her faltering hand upon the balustrade, 
Old Angela was feeling for the stair, 
When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid, 
Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware : 
With silver taper's light, and pious care, 
She turn'd, and down the aged gossip led 
To a safe level matting. Now prepare 
Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed ; 
She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd 
and fled. 

XXIII. 

Out went the taper as she hurried in ; 
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died : 
She closed the door, she panted all akin 
To spirits of the air, and visions wide ; 
Nor utter'd syllable, or, woe betide ! 
But to her heart her heart was voluble, 
Paining with eloquence her balmy side : 
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell 
Her throat in vain, and die heart-stifled in her 
dell. 

" Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died," 

is a verse in the taste of Chaucer, full of 
minute grace and truth. The smoke of the 
waxen taper seems almost as ethereal and fair 
as the moonlight, and both suit each other and 
the heroine. But what a lovely line is the 
seventh, about the heart, 

" Paining with eloquence her balmy side !" 



16 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



And the nightingale ! how touching the simile ! 
the heart a " tongueless nightingale," dying in 
that dell of the bosom. What thorough sweet- 
ness, and perfection of lovely imagery ! How 
one delicacy is heaped upon another ! But 
for a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, 
suddenly enriching the moonlight, as if a door 
of heaven were opened, read the following : — 

XXIV. 

A casement, high and triple-arch'd, there was, 
AH garlanded with carven imageries 
Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot- 
grass, 
And diamonded with panes of quaint device, 
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, 
As are the tiger-moth's deep damask' d wings ; 
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, 
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 
A shielded 'scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens 
and kings. 

Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy, 
with Titian's and Raphael's aid to boot, go be- 
yond the rich religion of this picture, with its 
"twilight saints," and its 'scutcheons "blushing 
with the blood of queens ?" But we must not 
stop the reader : — 

XXV. 

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, 
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair 

breast, 
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon; 
Rose-bloom fell on her hands together prest, 
And on her silver cross soft amethyst ; 
And on her hair a glory like a saint : 
She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest, 
Save wings, for heaven : — Porphyro grew faint, 
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal 
taint. 

The lovely and innocent creature thus pray- 
ing under the gorgeous painted window, com- 
pletes the exceeding and unique beauty of this 
picture, — one that will for ever stand by itself 
in poetry, as an addition to the stock. It 
would have struck a glow on the face of 
Shakespeare himself. He might have put 
Imogen or Ophelia under such a shrine. 
How proper, as well as pretty, the heraldic 
term gules, considering the occasion ! Red 
would not have been a fiftieth part so good. 
And with what elegant luxury he touches the 
" silver cross " with " amethyst," and the fair 
human hands with "rose colour," the kin to 
their carnation ! The lover's growing "faint," 
is one of the few inequalities which are to be 
found in the later productions of this great but 
young and over-sensitive poet. He had, at the 
time of writing his poems, the seeds of a mortal 
illness in him, and he, doubtless, wrote as he 
had felt — for he was also deeply in love ; and 
extreme sensibility struggled in him with a 
great understanding. But our picture is not 
finished : — 



Anon his heart revives : her vespers done, 
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees ; 
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one ; 
Loosens her fragrant boddice ; by degrees 
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees : 
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, 
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees 
In fancy fair St. Agnes in her bed, 
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is 
fled. 

How true and cordial the " warmed jewels ! " 
and what matter of fact also, made elegant, 
is the rustling downward of the attire ; and 
the mixture of dress and undress, and dishe- 
velled hair, likened to a "mermaid in sea- 
weed !" But the next stanza is perhaps the 
most exquisite in the poem. 



Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest, 
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay, 
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress' d 
Her soothed limbs, and soul, fatigued away, 
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day ; 
Blissfully haven' d both from joy and pain ; 
Clasp'd like a missal, where swart Paynims 

pray; 
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, 

As THOUGH A ROSE SHOULD SHUT, AND BE A BUD 
AGAIN. 

Can the beautiful go beyond this ? We 
never saw it. And how the imagery rises ! 
Flown like a thought — Blissfully haven'd — 
Clasp'd like a missal in a land of Pagans : 
that is to say, where Christian prayer-books 
must not be seen, and are, therefore, doubly 
cherished for the danger. And then, although 
nothing can surpass the preciousness of this 
idea, is the idea of the beautiful, crowning 
all— 

" Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, 

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again." 

Thus it is that poetry, in its intense sympathy 
with creation, may be said to create anew, 
rendering its words almost as tangible as the 
objects they speak of, and individually more 
lasting ; the spiritual perpetuity putting them 
on a level (not to speak it profanely) with the 
fugitive forms of the substance. 

But we are to have more luxuries still, 
presently. 

XXVIII. 

Stolen to this paradise, and so entranced, 
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress, 
And listen'd to her breathing, if it chanced 
To wake into a slumberous tenderness ; 
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless, 
And breathed, himself ; then from the closet crept, 
Noiseless as fear in a wild ivilderness, 
And over the hush'd carpet silent stept, 
And 'tween the curtains peep'd, where, lo ! how 
fast she slept. 



THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. 



Then, by the bedside, where the faded moon 
Made a dim silver twilight, — soft he set 
A table, and, half-anguish'd, threw thereon 
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet : — 
for some drowsy Morphean amulet ! 
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion, 
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet, 
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone : — 
The hall-door shuts again, and all the noise is gone. 

XXX. 

And still she slept an azure- lidded sleep 
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered, 
While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon : 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd 
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one, 
From silken Samarcand to cedar' 'd Lebanon. 

Here is delicate modulation, and super- 
refined epicurean nicety ! 

"Lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon," 

make us read the line delicately, and at the 
tip- end, as it were, of one's tongue. 

XXXI. 

These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand 
On golden dishes and in baskets bright 
Of wreathed silver : sumptuous they stand 
In the retired quiet of the night, 
Filling the chilly room with perfume light. — 
" And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake ! 
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite : 
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake, 
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth 
ache." 

XXXII. 

Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm 
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream 
By the dusk curtains : — 'twas a midnight charm 
Impossible to melt as iced stream : 
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam ; 
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies ; 
It seem'd he never, never could redeem 
From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes ; 
So mused awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies. 

XXXIII. 

Awakening up, he took her hollow lute, — 
Tumultuous,— and, in chords that tenderest be, 
He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute, 
In Provence call'd, " La belle dame sans mercy : " 
Close to her ear touching the melody ; — 
Wherewith disturb'd she utter'd a soft moan : 
He ceased — she panted quick — and suddenly 
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone : 
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured 
stone. 

XXXIV. 

Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, 
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep : 
There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd 
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep, 
At which fair Madeline began to weep, 
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh ; 
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep ; 
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, 
Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly. 

[PART II.] 



" Ah, Porphyro !" said she, " but even now 
Thy voice was a sweet tremble in mine ear, 
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow, 
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear ; 
How changed thou art ! how pallid, chill, and 

drear, — 
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, 
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear ; 
Oh ! leave me not in this eternal woe, 
For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to 

go." 

Madeline is half awake, and Porphyro reas- 
sures her with living kind looks, and an affec- 
tionate embrace. 

XXXVI. 

Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far 
At these voluptuous accents, he arose, 
Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star 
Seen 'mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose ; 
Into her dream he melted, as the rose 
Blendeth its odour with the violet, — 
Solution sweet. Meanwhile the frost wind blows 
Like love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet 
Against the window panes: St. Agnes' moon hath 
set. 

XXXVII. 

'Tis dark ; quick pattereth the flaw- blown sleet : 
" This is no dream ; my bride, my Madeline !•" 
'Tis dark : the iced gusts still rave and beat. 
u No dream, alas ! alas ! and woe is mine ; 
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine ; — 
Cruel ! what traitor could thee hither bring ? 
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine, 
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing ; — 
A dove, forlorn and lost, with sick unpruned 
wing." 

XXXVIII. 

" My Madeline ! sweet dreamer ! lovely bride ! 
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest ? 
Thy beauty's shield, heart-shaped, and vermeil- 
dyed? 
Ah ! silver shrine, here will I take my rest, 
After so many hours of toil and quest — 
A famish'd pilgrim, saved by miracle, 
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest 
Saving of thy sweet self ; if thou think'st well 
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel." 

With what a pretty wilful conceit the 
costume of the poem is kept up in the third 
line about the shield ! The poet knew when 
to introduce apparent trifles forbidden to those 
who are void of real passion, and who, feeling 
nothing intensely, can intensify nothing. 



" Hark ! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land, 
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed ; 
Arise — arise ! the morning is at hand ; 
The bloated wassailers will never heed : — 
Let us away, my love, with happy speed ; 
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, — 
Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead : 
Awake ! arise ! my love, and fearless be, 
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for 
thee." 



18 



A "NOW;" DESCRIPTIVE OF A COLD DAY. 



She hurried at his words, beset with fears, 
For there were sleeping dragons all around, 
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears — 
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found, — 
In all the house was heard no human sound. 
A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door; 
The arras, rife with horseman, hawk, and hound, 
Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar : 
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. 

This is a slip of the memory, for there w r ere 
hardly carpets in those days. But the truth 
of the painting makes amends, as in the un- 
chronological pictures of old masters. 



They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall ; 
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide, 
Where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl, 
With a huge empty flagon by his side ; 
The wakeful blood-hound rose, and shook his hide, 
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns : 
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide : 
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones ; 
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. 



And they are gone : ay, ages long ago 
These lovers fled away into the storm. 
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, 
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form 
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin- worm, 
Were long be-nightmared. Angela the old 
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform : 
The beadsman, after thousand aves told, 
For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold. 

Here endeth the young and divine Poet, but 
not the delight and gratitude of his readers ; 
for, as he sings elsewhere — 

" A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." 



XLIII.— A « NOW ;" 

DESCRIPTIVE OF A COiD DAY. 

Now, all amid the rigours of the year.— Thomson. 

A friend tells us, that having written a 
" Now," descriptive of a hot day (see " Indi- 
cator,") we ought to write another, descriptive 
of a cold one ; and accordingly we do so. It 
happens that we are, at this minute, in a state 
at once fit and unfit for the task, being in the 
condition of the little boy at school, who, when 
asked the Latin for " cold," said he had it " at 
his fingers' ends ;" but this helps us to set off 
with a right taste of our subject ; and the fire, 
which is clicking in our ear, shall soon enable 
us to handle it comfortably in other respects. 

Now, then, to commence. — But first, the reader 
who is good-natured enough to have a regard 
for these papers, may choose to be told of the 
origin of the use of this word Now, in case he 
is not already acquainted with it. It was 



suggested to us by the striking convenience it 
affords to descriprive writers, such as Thomson 
and others, who are fond of beginning their 
paragraphs with it, thereby saving themselves 
a world of trouble in bringing about a nicer 
conjunction of the various parts of their sub- 
ject. 

Now when the first foul torrent of the 
brooks — 

Note flaming up to heaven the potent sun — 

Now when the cheerless empire of the sky — 

But now — 

When now — 

Where now — 

For now — &c. 

We say nothing of similar words among 
other nations, or of a certain But of the Greeks 
which was as useful to them on all occasions as 
the And so of the little children's stories. Our 
business is with our old indigenous friend. No 
other Now can be so present, so instantaneous, 
so extremely Noic, as our own Now. The now 
of the Latins, — Nunc, or Jam, as he sometimes 
calls himself, — is a fellow of past ages. He is 
no Now. And the Nun of the Greek is older. 
How can there be a Now which was Then ? a 
"Now-then" as we sometimes barbarously phrase 
it. a Now and then" is intelligible ; but " Now- 
then" is an extravagance, fit only for the deli- 
cious moments of a gentleman about to crack 
his bottle, or to run away with a lady, or to 
open a dance, or to carve a turkey and chine, 
or to pelt snow-balls, or to commit some other 
piece of ultra- vivacity, such as excuses a man 
from the nicer proprieties of language. 

But to begin. 

Noiv the moment people wake in the morn- 
ing, they perceive the coldness with their faces, 
though they are warm with their bodies, and 
exclaim " Here's a day !" and pity the poor 
little sweep, and the boy with the water-cresses. 
How anybody can go to a cold ditch, and gather 
water-cresses, seems marvellous. Perhaps we 
hear great lumps in the street of something 
falling ; and, looking through the window, 
perceive the roofs of the neighbouring houses 
thick with snow. The breath is visible, issuing 
from the mouth as we lie. Now we hate 
getting up, and hate shaving, and hate the 
empty grate in one's bed-room ; and water 
freezes in ewers, and you may set the towel 
upright on its own hardness, and the window- 
panes are frost- whitened, or it is foggy, and 
the sun sends a dull, brazen beam into one's 
room ; or, if it is fine, the windows outside are 
stuck with icicles ; or a detestable thaw has 
begun, and they drip ; but, at all events, it is 
horribly cold, and delicate shavers fidget about 
their chambers looking distressed, and cherish 
their hard-hearted enemy, the razor, in their 
bosoms, to warm him a little, and coax him 
into a consideration of their chins. Savage is 
a cut, and makes them think destiny really too 
hard. 



A "NOW:" DESCRIPTIVE OF A COLD DAY. 



19 



Now breakfast is fine ; and the fire seems to 
laugh at us as we enter the breakfast-room, 
and say " Ha ! ha ! here's a better room than 
the bed-chamber ! " and we always poke it 
before we do anything else ; and people grow 
selfish about seats near it ; and little boys think 
their elders tyrannical for saying, " Oh, you 
don't want the fire ; your blood is young." 
And truly that is not the way of stating the 
case, albeit young bJood is warmer than old. 
Now the butter is too hard to spread ; and the 
rolls and toast are at their maximum ; and the 
former look glorious as they issue smoking out 
of the flannel in which they come from the 
baker's ; and people who come with single 
knocks at the door are pitied ; and the voices 
of boys are loud in the street, sliding or throw- 
ing snow-balls ; and the dustman's bell sounds 
cold ; and we wonder how anybody can go 
about selling fish, especially with that hoarse 
voice ; and schoolboys hate their slates, and 
blow their fingers, and detest infinitely the 
no-fire at school ; and the parish-beadle's nose 
is redder than ever. 

Now sounds in general are dull, and smoke 
out of chimneys looks warm and rich, and birds 
are pitied, hopping about for crumbs, and the 
trees look wiry and cheerless, albeit they are 
still beautiful to imaginative eyes, especially 
the evergreens, and the birch with boughs like 
dishevelled hair. Now mud in roads is stiff, 
and the kennel ices over, and boys make illegal 
slides in the pathways, and ashes are strewed 
before doors ; or you crunch the snow as you 
tread, or kick mud-flakes before you, or are 
horribly muddy in cities. But if it is a hard 
frost, all the world is buttoned up and great- 
coated, except ostentatious elderly gentlemen, 
and pretended beggars with naked feet ; and 
the delicious sound of " All hot " is heard from 
roasted apple and potatoe stalls, the vender 
himself being cold, in spite of his " hot," and 
stamping up and down to warm his feet ; 
and the little boys are astonished to think how 
he can eat bread and cold meat for his dinner, 
instead of the smoking apples. 

Now skaiters are on the alert ; the cutlers' 
shop-windows abound with their swift shoes ; 
and as you approach the scene of action (pond 
or canal) you hear the dull grinding noise of 
the skaits to and fro, and see tumbles, and 
Banbury cake-men and blackguard boys play- 
ing "hockey," and ladies standing shivering 
on the banks, admiring anybody but their 
brother, especially the gentleman who is cutting 
figures of eight, who, for his part, is ad- 
miring his own figure. Beginners affect to 
laugh at their tumbles, but are terribly angry, 
and long to thump the by-standers. On 
thawing days, idlers persist to the last in 
skaiting or sliding amidst the slush and bend- 
ing ice, making the Humane-Society-man 
ferocious. He feels as if he could give them 
the deaths from which it is his business to save 



them. When you have done skaiting, you 
come away feeling at once warm and numb in 
the feet, from the tight effect of the skaits ; 
and you carry them with an ostentatious air of 
indifference, as if you had done wonders ; 
whereas you have fairly had three slips, and 
can barely achieve the inside edge. 

Now riders look sharp, and horses seem 
brittle in the legs, and old gentlemen feel so ; 
and coachmen, cabmen, and others, stand 
swinging their arms across at their sides to warm 
themselves ; and blacksmiths' shops look 
pleasant, and potatoe shops detestable ; the 
fishmongers' still more so. We wonder how he 
can live in ^that plash of wet and cold fish, 
without even a window. Now clerks in offices 
envy the one next the fire-place ; and men 
from behind counters hardly think themselves 
repaid by being called out to speak to a 
countess in her chariot ; and the wheezy and 
effeminate pastry-cook, hatless and aproned, 
and with his hand in his breeches-pockets (as 
the graphic Cruikshank noticeth in his alma- 
nack) stands outside his door, chilling his 
household warmth with attending to the ice 
which is brought him, and seeing it unloaded 
into his cellar like coals. Comfortable look the 
Miss Joneses, coming this way with their muffs 
and furs ; and the baker pities the maid- 
servant cleaning the steps, who, for her part, 
says she'is not cold, which he finds it difficult 
to believe. 

Now dinner rejoiceththe gatherers together, 
and cold meat is despised, and the gout defieth 
the morrow, thinking it but reasonable on such 
a day to inflame itself with " t'other bottle ;" 
and the sofa is wheeled round to the fire after 
dinner, and people proceed to burn their legs 
in their boots, and little boys their faces ; and 
young ladies are tormented between the cold 
and their complexions, and their fingers freeze 
at the piano-forte, but they must not say so, 
because it will vex their poor comfortable 
grand-aunt, who is sitting with her knees in 
the fire, and who is so anxious that they should 
not be spoilt. 

Now the muffin-bell soundeth sweetly in the 
streets, reminding us, not of the man, but his 
muffins, and of twilight, and evening, and 
curtains, and the fireside. Now play-goers get 
cold feet, and invalids stop up every crevice in 
their rooms, and make themselves worse ; and 
the streets are comparatively silent ; and the 
wind rises and falls in moanings ; and the fire 
burns blue and crackles ; and an easy-chair with 
your feet by it on a stool, the lamp or candles 
a little behind you, and an interesting book 
just opened where you left off, is a bit of 
heaven upon earth. People in cottages crowd 
close into the chimney, and tell stories of ghosts 
and murders, the blue flame affording some- 
thing like evidence of the facts. 

" The owl, with all her feathers, is a-cold *," 
* Keats, in the " Eve of St. Agnes." Mr. Keats gave us 

C 2 



20 



ICE— WITH POETS UPON IT. 



or you think her so. The whole country feels 
like a petrifaction of slate and stillness, cut 
across by the wind ; and nobody in the mail- 
coach is warm but the horses, who steam 
pitifully when they stop. The " oldest man" 
makes a point of never having " seen such 
weather." People have a painful doubt whether 
they have any chins or not ; ears ache with 
the wind ; and the waggoner, setting his teeth 
together, goes puckering up his cheeks, and 
thinking the time will never arrive when he 
shall get to the Five Bells. 

At night, people become sleepy with the fire- 
side, and long to go to bed, yet fear it on account 
of the different temperature of the bed-room ; 
which is furthermore apt to wake them up. 
Warming-pans and hot-water bottles are in 
request ; and naughty boys eschew their night- 
shirts, and go to bed in their socks. 

"Yes," quoth a little boy, to whom we read 
this passage, " and make their younger brother 
go to bed first." 



XLIV.— ICE,— WITH POETS UPON IT. 

It is related of an Emperor of Morocco, that 
some unfortunate traveller having thought to 
get into his good graces by telling him of the 
wonders of other countries, and exciting, as he 
proceeded, more and more incredulity in the 
imperial mind, finished, as he imagined, his 
delightful climax of novelties, by telling him, 
that in his native land, at certain seasons of 
the year, people could walk and run upon the 
water ; upon which such indignation seized his 
majesty, that, exclaiming, "Such a liar as this 
is not fit to live !" he whipped off the poor 
man's head with his scymitar. 

It is a pity that some half dozen captives 
had not been present, from other northern 
regions, to give the monarch's perplexity a 
more salutary turn, by testifying to similar 
phenomena ; as, how you drove your chariot 
over the water ; how lumps of water came 
rolling down-hill like rocks ; and how you 
chopped, not only your stone-hard meat, but 
your stone-hard drink, holding a pound of 
water between pincers, and pelting a fellow 
with a gill of brandy instead of a stone. For 
such things are in Russia and Tartary ; where, 
furthermore, a man shall have half a yard of 
water for his beard ; throw a liquid up in the 
air, and catch it a solid ; and be employed in 
building houses made of water, for empresses 
to sit in and take supper. Catherine the 
Second had one. 

" It was a miracle of rare device, 
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice ; " 

some touches in our account of the " Hot Day " (first pub- 
lished in the " Indicator ") as we sat writing it in his com- 
pany, alas ! how many years back. We have here made 
him contribute to our " Cold Day." This it is to have 
immortal friends, whose company never forsakes us. 



thus realising Mr. Coleridge's poetical descrip- 
tion of the palace of Kubla Khan . 

Many a natural phenomenon is as poetical 
as this, and adjusts itself into as imaginative 
shapes and lights. Fancy the meeting an 
island-mountain of green or blue ice, in a 
sunny sea, moving southwards, and shedding 
fountains from its sparkling sides ! The poet 
has described the icicle, 

" Quietly shining to the quiet moon : " 

but the icicle (so to speak) described itself 
first to the poet. Water, when it begins to 
freeze, makes crystals of itself; the snow is all 
stars or feathers, or takes the shape of flowers 
upon your window ; and the extreme of solemn 
grandeur, as well as of fairy elegance, is to be 
found in the operations of frost. In Switzer- 
land gulfs of petrified billows are formed in 
whole valleys by the descent of ice from the 
mountains, its alternate thawing and freezing, 
and the ministry of the wind. You stand 
upon a crag, and see before you wastes of 
icy solitude, looking like an ocean heaven- 
struck in the midst of its fury, and fixed for 
ever. Not another sight is to be seen, but the 
ghastly white mountains that surround it ; — 
not a sound to be heard, but of under-currents 
of water breaking away, or the thunders of 
falling ice-crags, or, perhaps the scream of an 
eagle. 'Tis as if you saw the world before 
heat moved it, — the rough materials of the 
masonry of creation. 

" Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, 
Mont Blanc appears, still, snowy, and serene — 
Its subject-mountains their unearthly forms 
Pile round it, ice and rock ; broad vales between 
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, 
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread 
And wind among the accumulated steeps ; 
A desart, peopled by the storms alone."— Shell e v. 

On the other hand, what is more prettily 
beautiful than the snow above mentioned, or 
the hoar-frost upon the boughs of a tree, like 
the locks of Spenser's old man, 

" As hoary frost with spangles doth attire 
The mossy branches of an oak half dead ;" 

or the spectacle (in the verses quoted below) 
of a Northern garden, 

" Where through the ice the crimson berries glow." 

Our winters of late have been very mild ; 
and most desirable is it, for the poor's sake, 
that they should continue so, if the physical 
good of the creation will allow it. But when 
frost and ice come, we must make the best of 
them ; and Nature, in her apparently severest 
operations, never works without some visible 
mixture of good, as well as a great deal of 
beauty (itself a good). Cold weather counter- 
acts worse evils : the very petrifaction of the 
water furnishes a new ground for sport and 
pastime. Then in every street the little boys 
find a gliding pleasure, and the sheet of ice in 



ICE,— WITH POETS UPON IT. 



21 



the pond or river spreads a joyous floor for 
skaiters. We touched upon this the other 
day in a "Now ;" but now we have the satis- 
faction of being able to quote some fine verses 
of Mr. Wordsworth's on the subject, which 
we happened not to have by us at the moment. 
They are taken from a new edition of Mr. 
Mine's judicious and valuable ' Selections ' 
from that fine poet, just published by Mr. 
Moxon. They are the more interesting, inas- 
much as they show Mr. Wordsworth to be a 
skaiter himself, — no mean reason for his being 
able to write so vigorously. 

" SKAITTNG. 

—In the frosty season, when the sun 

Was set, and, visible for many a mile, 

The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, 

I heeded not the summons : — happy time 

It was indeed for all of us ; for me 

It was a time of rapture ! — clear and loud 

The village clock toll'd six — I wheel'd about, 

Proud and exulting like an untired horse, 

That cares not for his home. — All shod with steel, 

We hiss'd along the polish 'd ice in games 

Confederate, imitative of the chase 

And woodland pleasures,— the resounding horn, 

The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare. 

So through the darkness and the cold we flew, 

And not a voice was idle ; with the din 

Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud. 

The leafless trees and every icy crag 

Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills 

Into the tumult sent an alien sound 

Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars 

Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the West 

The orange sky of evening died away. 

Not seldom from the uproar I retired 

Into a silent bay, — or sportively 

Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng, 

To cut across the reflex of a star, 

Image, that, flying still before me, gleam'd 

Upon the glassy plain ; and oftentimes, 

When we had given our bodies to the wind, 

And all the shadowy banks on either side 

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 

The rapid line of motion, then at once 

Have I, reclining back upon my heels, 

Stopp'd short ; yet still the solitary cliffs 

Wheel'd by me — even as if the earth had roll'd 

With visible motion her diurnal round ! 

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, 

Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd 

Till all was tranquil as a summer sea." 

Better for great poets to write in this man- 
ner, and show Nature's kindliness in the midst 
of what might seem otherwise, than to do as 
Dante and Milton have done, and add the 
tortures of frost and ice to the horrors of 
superstition. Be never their names, however, 
mentioned without reverence. The progress 
of things may have required at their hands 
what we can smile at now as a harmless terror 
of poetry. With what fine solid lines Milton 
always " builds" his verse ! 

Beyond this flood * a frozen continent 
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms 
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land 
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems 

* The river of Oblivion. 



Of ancient pile, or else deep snow and ice, 

A gulf profound, as that Serbonian bog 

Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, 

Where armies whole have sunk f. The parching air 

Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire. 

Thither, by harpy-footed furies hal'd, 

At certain revolutions, all the damn'd 

Are brought, and feel by turns the bitter change 

Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce 

From beds of raging fire, to starve in ice 

Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine 

Immoveable, infix'd, and frozen round, 

Periods of time, thence hurried back to firei. 

We will take the taste of the bitter-cold 
barbarity of this passage out of the reader's 
heart by plunging him into the a warm South," 
with its good-natured sunshine ; where, when 
he has basked enough in some noon of heat, 
vine-leaves, and brown laughing faces, so as to 
make the idea of cold pleasant to him again, 

f "Serbonis," says Hume (not the historian, but the 
commentator on Milton), "was a lake of 200 furlongs in 
length and 1.000 in compass, between the ancient moun- 
tain Casius and Damiata, a city of Egypt, on one of the 
more eastern mouths of the Nile. It was surrounded on 
all sides by hills of loose sand, which, carried into the 
water by high winds, so thickened the lake, as not to be 
distinguished from part of the continent, where whole 
armies have been swallowed up. Read ' Herodotus,' lib. iii., 
and ' Lucan's Pharsalia,' viii. 539, &c." Todd's edition of 
Milton, vol. ii. p. 47. 

£ We add another note or two from Mr. Todd's ' Milton,' 
to show what pleasant reading there is in these Variorum 
editions, and to recommend them to more general atten- 
tion. A great poet cannot be too thoroughly studied :— 

" This circumstance of the damned suffering the ex- 
tremes of heat and cold by turns, seems to be founded upon 
Job xxiv. 1.9, not as it is in the English translation, but in 
the vulgar Latin version, which Milton often used :—' Ad 
nimium calorem transeat ab aquis nivium ,•' — ' Let him 
pass to excessive heat from waters of snow.' And so Jerome 
and other commentators understand it. The same punish- 
ments after death are mentioned by Shakspeare, ' Measure 
for Measure,' act iii. sc i.— 

' and the delighted spirit 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.' " 

Bishop Newton. 

" This circumstance of the damned's feeling the fierce 
extremes is also in Dante, ' Inferno,' c. iii. 86. — 
' I' vengo per menarvi all' altra riva 
Nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e'n gielo.' 

(I come to lead thee to the other shore 

Of the eternal glooms, through heat and ice. 

See also the ' Purgatorio,' c. iii. 31. So in ' Songs and 
Sonnets,' by Lord Surrey and others, 1587. fol. 83, — 
' The soules that lacked grace, 

Which lie in bitter pain, 

Are not in such a place 

As foolish folk do fayne : 

Tormented all with fire, 

And boyle in lead again — 

Then cast in frozen pits 

To frese there certain hours.' 

And in « Heywood's Hierarchie of Angels,' 1635, p. 345 : — 

' And suffer as they sinned, in wrath, in paines 

Of frosts, of fires, of furies, whips, and chains.' 

" In the preceding quotation from * Surrey's Songs and 

Sonnets,' there is evidently a sneer at the monks, from 

whose legendary hell, according to Mr. Warton, the 

punishment by cold derives its origin "—Todd. 



22 



ICE,— WITH POETS UPON IT. 



and his eye turn wistfully to those snow-topped 
mountains yonder, cooling the blue burning 
air, let him refresh his wine with the Bacchus 
of the Italian poet Redi : — 



ICE NECESSARY TO WINE. 

Col topazio pigiato in Lamporecchio, 

Ch' e famoso Castel per quel Masetto, 

A inghirlandar le tazze or m' apparecchio, 

Purche gelato sia, e sia puretto, 

Gelato, quale alia stagion del' gielo 

II piu freddo Aquilon fischia pel cielo. 

Cantinette e cantimplore 

Stieno in pronto a tutte 1' ore 

Con forbite bombolette 

Chiuse e strette tra le brine 

Delle nevi cristalline. 

Son le nevi il quinto elemento 

Che compongono il vero bevere : 

Ben e folle chi spera ricevere 

Senza nevi nel bere un contento : 

Venga pur da Vallombrosa 

Neve a josa ; 

Venga pur da ogni bicocca 

Neve in chiocca ; 

E voi, Satiri, lasciate 

Tante frottole, e tanti riboboli, 

E del gbiaccio mi portate 

Da la grotta del Monte di Boboli. 

Con alti picchi 

De' mazzapicchi 

Dirompetelo, 

Sgretolatelo, 

Infragnetelo, 

Stritolatelo, 

Finche tutto si possa risolvere 

In minuta freddissima polvere, 

Che mi renda il ber piu fresco 

Per rinfresco del palato, 

Or ch' io son mortoassetato. 

Bacco in Toscana. 

You know Lamporecchio, the castle renown'd 

For the gardener so dumb, whose works did abound ; 

There's a topaz they make there ; pray let it go round. 

Serve, serve me a dozen, 

But let it be frozen ; 

Let it be frozen and finish 'd with ice, 

And see that the ice be as virginly nice, 

As the coldest that whistles from wintery skies. 

Coolers and cellarets, crystal with snows, 

Should always hold bottles in ready repose. 

Snow is good liquor's fifth element ; 

No compound without it can give content : 

For weak is the brain, and I hereby scout it, 

That thmks in hot weather to drink without it. 

Bring me heaps from the Shady Valley * : 

Bring me heaps 

Of all that sleeps 

On every village hill and alley. 

Hold there, you satyrs, 

Your beard-shaking chatters, 

And bring me ice duly, and bring it me doubly, 

Out of the grotto of Monte di Boboli. 

With axes and pickaxes, 

Hammers and rammers, 

Thump it and hit it me, 

Crack it and crash it me, 
Hew it and split it me, 

Pound it and smash it me, 
Till the whole mass (for I'm dead-dry, I think) 
Turns to a cold, fit to freshen my drink. 

* Vallombrosa, which an Englishman may call Milton's 
Vallombrosa. The convent is as old as the time of Ariosto, 
who celebrates the monks for their hospitality. 



Ice is such a luxury in the South of Europe, 
and has become also such a necessity, that in 
some places a dearth of it is considered the 
next thing to a want of bread. To preach 
tortures of ice at Naples, would be the counter- 
part of the mistake of the worthy missionary, 
who was warned how he said too much of the 
reverse kind of punishment to the Laplanders. 
Dante was a native of Florence, where they 
have winters hard enough ; and where, by 
the way, during its delightful summers, we 
have eaten, for a few pence, ice-cream enough 
to fill three of our silver-costing glasses in 
England. They bring it you in goblets. The 
most refreshing beverage we ever drank, was 
a Florentine lemonade, made with fresh lemons 
(off the tree), sweetened with capillaire, and 
floating with ice. 

But, if it were not for our subject, we ought 
to keep these summer reminiscences for next 
August. We conclude with a proper winter 
picture, painted by one who has been thought 
(and is, compared with great ones) a very 
small poet (Ambrose Philips), but who had a 
vein of truth in all he wrote, which would 
have obtained him more esteem in an age of 
poets, than it did in an age of wits. Good- 
natured Steele, however, discerned his merits ; 
and the poem before us, which Steele inserted 
in the * Tatler,' was admired by them all. It 
was too new in its localities, and too evidently 
drawn from nature, not to please them ; and 
was, furthermore, addressed to, and patronised 
by a wit — the Earl of Dorset. 

A NORTHERN WINTER. 

Copenhagen, March 9, 1709. 
From frozen climes, and endless tracts of snow, 
From streams that northern winds forbid to flow, 
"What present shall the Muse to Dorset bring, 
Or how so near the Pole attempt to sing ? 
The hoary winter here conceals from sight 
All pleasing objects that to verse invite. 
The hills and dales, and the delightful woods, 
The flowery plains, and silver-streaming floods, 
By snow disguised, in bright confusion lie, 
And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye. 

No gentle-breathing breeze prepares the spring, 
Nor birds within the desert region sing. 
The ships unmoved the boisterous winds defy, 
While rattling chariots o'er the ocean fly. 
The vast Leviathan wants room to play, 
And spout his waters in the face of day ; 
The starving wolves along the main sea prowl, 
And to the moon in icy valleys howl. 
For many a shining league, the level main 
Here spreads itself into a glassy plain : 
There solid billows of enormous size, 
Alps of green ice, in wild disorder rise. 

And yet, but lately have I seen, even here, 
The winter in a lovely dress appear. 
Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, 
Or winds began through hazy skies to blow, 
At evening a keen eastern breeze arose 
And the descending rain unsullied froze. 
Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 
The ruddy morn disclosed at once to view 
The face of nature in a rich disguise, 
And brighten'd every object to my eyes ; 



THE PIANO-FORTE. 



23 



For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 

And every pointed thorn seem'd wrought in glass. 

In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, 

While through the ice the crimson berries glow. 

The thick-sprung reeds the watery marshes yield 

Seem polish 'd lances in a hostile field. 

The stag in limpid currents, with surprise, 

Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise. 

The spreading oak, the beech, and toAvering pine, 

Glazed over, in the freezing ether shine. 

The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, 

That wave and glitter in the distant sun. 

When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, 

The brittle forest into atoms flies : 

The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends, 

And in a spangled shower the prospect ends ,• 

Or, if a southern gale the region warm, 

And by degrees unbind the wintry charm, 

The traveller a miry country sees, 

And journeys sad beneath the dripping trees. 

Like some deluded peasant Merlin leads 

Through fragrant bowers, and through delicious meads : 

While here enchanted gardens to him rise, 

And airy fabrics there attract his eyes, 

His wandering feet the magic paths pursue ; 

And while he thinks the fair illusion true, 

The trackless scenes disperse in fluid air, 

And woods, and wilds, and thorny ways appear : 

A tedious road the weary wretch returns, 

And as he goes, the transient vision mourns. 



XL V.— THE PIANO-FORTE. 

Henry the Fourth expressed a patriotic 
hope to see the time arrive when every man 
in France should have "a fowl boiling in 
his pot." The anathemas of an able political 
writer* against music-playing in farmers' 
houses (very just if his calculation of the effect 
of it were the only one) do not hinder us from 
expressing a hope, that the time may arrive 
when every family that can earn its subsist- 
ence shall have its Piano-forte. Not to make 
them " fine and fashionable," or contemptuous 
of any right thinking ; but to help them to 
the pleasures of true refinement, to reward them 
for right thinking and right doing, and make 
them feel how compatible are the homeliest of 
their duties with an elegant recreation ; — just 
as the fields and homesteads around them are 
powdered with daisies and roses, and the very 
cabbages in their gardens can glitter with sunny 
dew-drops, to those that have eyes beyond 
their common use. 

In Germany they have Piano-fortes in inns 
and cottages ; why should they not have them 
in England ? The only true answer is, because 
we seafaring and commercial Saxons, by very 
reason of our wealth, and of the unequal 
advance of knowledge in comparison with it, 
have missed the wiser conclusions, in this 
respect, of our Continental brethren, and been 
accustomed to the vulgar mistake of identify- 
ing all refinement with riches, and, conse- 
quently, all the right of being refined with the 
attainment of them. We fancy that nobody 
can or will be industrious and condescend to a 
* Mr. Cobbett. 



homely duty, who has a taste for an elegance ; 
and, so fancying, we bring up the nation, at their 
peril, to have the same opinion, and thus the 
error is maintained, and all classes suffer for 
it ; the rich, because it renders them but half 
sensible of the real enjoyment of their accom- 
plishments, and makes them objects of jealousy 
to the poor ; and the poor, because it forces 
them to work out, with double pain, that pro- 
gression towards a better state of things, the 
steps of which would be healed and elevated 
by such balmy accompaniments. In England, 
it is taken for an affectation, or some worse 
sign, if peopleshowan inclination to accomplish- 
ments not usually found within their sphere. 
But the whole evil consists in the accomplish- 
ments not being there already, and constituting 
a part of their habits ; for in Germany the 
circumstance is regarded with no such ill-will; 
nor do the male or female performers who can 
play on the Piano forte or sing to it (and there 
are millions of such) fancy they have the fewer 
duties to perform, or that they are intitled a 
bit the more to disrespect those duties. On 
the contrary, they just know so much the 
better what is good both in the duty and the 
recreation ; for no true thing can co-exist 
falsely with another that is true ; each re- 
flects light and comfort on each. To have one 
set of feelings harmonised and put in good 
key, is to enable us to turn others to their best 
account ; and he or she who could go from 
their music to their duties in a frame of mind 
the worse for it, would only be the victim of a 
false opinion eradicable, and not of a natural 
feeling improveable. But false refinements 
are first set up, and then made judges of true 
ones. A foolish rich man, who can have con- 
certs in his house, identifies his music, not 
with anything that he really feels or knows 
about it, but with his power to afford it. He 
is of opinion with Hugh Rebeck in the play, 
when he is asked why music is said to have a 
a silver sound," — " Because musicians sound 
for silver." But if he knew what music really 
was, he would not care twopence for the show 
and flare of the thing, any more than he 
would to have a nightingale painted like a 
parrot. You may have an JEolian harp in 
your window that shall cost twenty guineas 
— you may have another that shall cost little 
more than as many pence. Will the winds 
visit the poor one with less love ? or the true 
ear hear it with the less rapture ? One of the 
obstacles in the way of a general love of 
music, in this country, is the dearness of it, 
both print and instrument ; and this is another 
effect of the mistakes of wealth. The rich, 
having monopolised music, have made it costly ; 
and the mistaken spirit of trade encourages 
the delusion, instead of throwing open the 
source of comfort to greater numbers. A 
costly Piano-forte makes a very fine, and, it 
must be owned, a very pleasing show in a 



24 



THE PIANO-FORTE. 



room, if made in good taste ; but not a bit 
of the fineness is necessary to it. A Piano- 
forte is a harp in a box ; and the box might 
be made of any decent materials, and the harp 
strung for a comparative nothing to what it is 
now. If we took a lesson from our cousins in 
Saxony and Bavaria, the demand for cheap 
Piano-fortes would soon bring down the price ; 
and instead of quarrelling over their troubles, 
or muddling them with beer and opium, and 
rendering themselves alike unfit for patience 
and for action, the poor would "get up" some 
nmsic in their villages, and pursue their duties, 
or their claims, with a calmness beneficial to 
everybody. 

We are aware of the political question that 
might be put to us at these points of our specu- 
lation ; but we hold it to be answered by the 
real nature of the case, and, in fact, to have 
nothing whatever to do with it. We are an 
unmusical people at present (unless the climate 
have to do with it,) simply because of what has 
been stated, and not for any reason connected 
with questions of greater or less freedom. The 
most musical countries — Greece, Italy, and 
Germany — have alike been free or enslaved, 
according as other circumstances happened ; 
not as music was more or less regarded ; with 
this difference, that the more diffused the 
music, the more happy the peace, or the more 
"deliberate" the "valour*." The greatest 
among the most active as well as most con- 
templative of mankind have been lovers of 
music, often performers of it, and have gene- 
rally united, in consequence, both action and 
contemplation. Epaminondas was a flute- 
player ; so was Frederick the Second ; and 
Luther and Milton were organists. 

In connexion with music, then, let us hear 
nothing about politics, either way. It is one of 
God's goods which we ought to be desirous to 
see cultivated among us, next after corn, and 
honesty, and books. The human hand was 
made to play it, the ear to hear it, the soul to 
think it something heavenly ; and if we do not 
avail ourselves of it accordingly, we turn not 
our hands, ears, and souls to their just account, 
nor reap half the benefit we might from the 
very air that sounds it. 

A Piano-forte is a most agreeable object. 
It is a piece of furniture with a soul in it, 
ready to waken at a touch, and charm us with 
invisible beauty. Open or shut, it is pleasant 
to look at ; but open, it looks best, smiling at 



Anon they move 



In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood 
Of flutes and soft recorders : such as raised 
To height of noblest temper heroes old 
Arming to battle ; and, instead of rage, 
Deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved, 
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat : 
Nor wanting power to mitigate and 'swage 
With solemn touches troubled thought, and chase 
Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain, 
From mortal or immortal minds." — Paradise Lost. 



us with its ivory keys, like the mouth of a 
sweet singer. The keys of a Piano-forte are, of 
themselves, an agreeable spectacle, — an ele- 
gance not sufficiently prized for their aspect, 
because they are so common ; but well worth 
regarding even in that respect. The colour 
of the white keys is not a cold white ; or even 
when at their whitest, there is something of a 
warmth in the idea of ivory. The black fur- 
nish a sort of tesselation, and all are smooth and 
easy to the touch. It is one of the advantages 
of this instrument to the learner, that there is 
no discord to go through in getting at a tone. 
The tone is ready made. The finger touches 
the key, and there is music at once. Another 
and greater advantage is, that it contains a 
whole concert in itself ; for you may play with 
all your fingers, and then every finger per- 
forms the part of a separate instrument. 
True, it will not compare with a real concert, 
— with the rising winds of an orchestra ; but 
in no single instrument, except the organ, can 
you have such a combination of sounds ; and 
the organ itself cannot do for you what the 
Piano-forte does. You can neither get it so 
cheap, nor will it condescend to play every- 
thing for you as the other does. It is a lion 
which has " no skill in dandling the kid." It 
is a Jupiter, unable to put off his deity when 
he visits you. The Piano-forte is not incapa- 
ble of the grandest music, and it performs the 
light and neat to admiration, and does not 
omit even the tender. You may accompany 
with it, almost equally well, the social graces 
of Mozart, and the pathos of Winter and 
Paesiello ; and, as to a certain miniature i 
brilliancy of taste and execution, it has given j 
rise to a music of its own, in the hands of j 
Clementi and others. All those delicate ivory j 
keys which repose in such evenness and quiet, i 
wait only the touch of the master's fingers to 
become a dancing and singing multitude, and, j 
out of apparent confusion, make accordant 
loveliness. How pleasant to the uninitiated 
to see him lay his hand upon them, as if in 
mere indifference, or at random ; and as he 
dimples the instrument with touches wide and 
numerous as rain-drops on a suinmer-sea, play 
upon the ear the most regular harmonies, and 
give us, in a twinkling, elaborations which it 
would take us years to pick out ! We forget 
that he has gone through the same labour, and 
think only of the beautiful and mysterious 
result. He must have a taste, to be sure, 
which no labour can gift him with, and of this 
we have a due sense. We wish we had a book 
by us, written a few years back, intitled " A 
Ramble among the Musicians in Germany," 
in order that we might quote a passage from 
it about the extempore playing of Hummel, 
the celebrated master who was lately in this 
country ; but, if we are not mistaken, it is the 
hand of the same writer which, in so good a 
style, between sport and scholarship, plays its 



THE PIANO-FORTE. 



25 



musical criticisms every week in "The Atlas ; " 
for they are the next thing to an instrument 
themselves ; and we recommend our readers 
to get a sight of that paper as often as they 
can, in order to cultivate the taste of which 
England at present seems to be so promisingly 
ambitious. By the way, we know not whether 
the Italians use the word in the same sense 
at present ; but in an old dictionary in our 
possession, the keys of musical instruments 
are called " tasti," — tastes, — a very expressive 
designation. You do taste the Piano-forte the 
moment you touch it. Anybody can taste it ; 
which, as we said before, is not the case with 
other instruments, the tone in them not being 
ready made ; though a master, of course, may 
apply the word to any. 

" So said,— his hand, sprightly as fire, he flings, 
And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings." 

There are superfine ears that profess not to 
be able to endure a Piano-forte after a concert ; 
others that always find it to be out of tune ; 
and more who veil their insensibility to music 
in general, by protesting against " everlasting 
tinkles," and school-girl affectation or sullen- 
ness. It is not a pleasure, certainly, which a 
man would select, to be obliged to witness 
affectations of any sort, much less sullenness, or 
any other absurdity. Such young ladies as are 
perpetually thinking of their abstract preten- 
sions, and either affectedly trying to screw up 
their musical skill to them, or resenting, with 
tears and petty exclamations, that they cannot 
do it, are not the most sensible and agreeable 
of all possible charmers. But these terrible 
calamities may be safely left to the endurance, 
or non-endurance, of the no less terrible critics, 
who are so merciless upon them, or pretend to 
be. The critics and the performers will equally 
take themselves for prodigious people ; and 
music will do both parties more good than 
harm in the long-run, however their zeal may 
fall short of their would-be capacity for it. 
With respect to Piano-fortes not perfectly in 
tune, it is a curious fact in the history of 
sounds, that no instrument is ever perfectly in 
tune. Even the heavenly charmer, music, 
being partly of earth as well as of heaven, par- 
takes the common imperfection of things sub- 
lunary. It is, therefore, possible to have 
senses too fine for it, if we are to be always 
sensible of this imperfection ; to 

" Die of an air in achromatic pain ;" 

and if we are not to be thus sensible, who is 
to judge at what nice point of imperfection the 
disgust is to begin, where no disgust is felt by 
the general ear ? The sound of a trumpet, 
in Mozart's infancy, is said to have threatened 
him with convulsions. To such a man, and 
especially to so great a master, every right of 
a horror of discord would be conceded, sup- 
posing his ear to have grown up as it began ; 



but that it did not do so is manifest from his 
use of trumpets ; while at the same time so 
fine beyond ultra-fineness was his ear, that 
there is a passage in his works, pronounced 
impracticably discordant by the whole musical 
world, which nevertheless the critics are agreed 
that he must have written as it stands*. In 
other words, Mozart perceived a harmony in 
discord itself, or what universally appeared to 
be such, — just as very fine tastes in eating and 
drinking relish something which is disliked by 
the common palate ; or, as the reading world 
discovered, not long ago, that Pope, for all his 
sweetness, was not so musical a versifier as 
those " crabbed old English poets." The crabs 
were found to be very apples of the Hesperides. 
What we would infer from this is, that the 
same exquisite perception which discerned the 
sweetness in the sour of that discord, would 
not have been among the first to despise an 
imperfection in the tuning of an instrument, 
nor, though he might wish it away, be rendered 
insensible by it of that finest part of the good 
music it performed, which consists in inven- 
tion, and expression, and grace, — always the 
flower of music, as of every other art, and to 
be seen and enjoyed by the very finest ears as 
well as the humbler ones of good- will, because 
the soul of a thing is worth more to them than 
the body of it, and the greater is greater than 
the less. 

Thus much to caution true lovers of music 
how they suffer their natural discernment to 
be warped by niceties " more nice than wise," 
and to encourage them, if an instrument 
pleases the general lovers of music, to try and 
be pleased with it as much as they can them- 
selves, maugre what technical refiners may say 
of it, probably out of a jealousy of those whose 
refinements are of a higher order. All instru- 
ments are out of tune, the acoustic philosopher 
tells us. Well, be it so ; provided we are not 
so much out of tune ourselves as to know it, 
or to be unable to discern something better in 
spite of it. 

As to those who, notwithstanding their pre- 
tended love of music at other times, are so 
ready to talk of "jingling" and "tinkling," 
whenever they hear a Piano-forte, or a poor 
girl at her lesson, they have really no love of 
music whatsoever, and only proclaim as much 
to those who understand them. They are 
among the wiseacres who are always proving 
their spleen at the expense of their wit. 

Piano-fortes will probably be much improved 
by the next generation. Experiments are 
daily making with them, sometimes of much 
promise ; and the extension of science on all 
hands bids fair to improve whatever is con- 
nected with mechanism. We are very well con- 
tent, however, for ourselves, with the instru- 
ment as it is ; are grateful for it, as a concert 

* We cannot refer to it in its place ; but it was quoted 
some time since in " The Atlas." 



26 



THE PIANO-FORTE. 



in miniature ; and admire it as a piece of fur- 
niture in all its shapes : only we do not like to 
see it made a table of, and laden with move- 
ables ; nor when it is upright, does it seem 
quite finished without a bust on it ; perhaps, 
because it makes so good a pedestal, and seems 
to call for one. 

Piano-forte (soft and stroDg) is not a good 
| name for an instrument which is no softer nor 
; stronger than some others. The organ unites 
the two qualities most ; but organ (opyavov, 
instrumentum, — as if the instrument, by excel- 
lence) is the proper word for it, not to be 
parted with, and of a sound fit for its noble- 
ness. The word Piano-forte came up, when 
the harpsichord and spinet, its predecessors, 
were made softer. Harpsichord (arpichorda, — 
commonly called in Italian clavicembalo, or 
keyed cymbal, i. e. a box or hollow, Fr. clavecin) 
is a sounding but hardly a good word, meaning 
a harp with chords — which may be said of any 
harp. Spinet, an older term (spinette, thorns), 
signifies the quills which used to occupy the 
place of the modern clothed hammers, and 
which produced the harsh sound in the old 
instruments ; the quill striking the edge of the 
strings, like the nicking of a guitar-string by 
the nail. The spinet was preceded by the 
Virginals, the oldest instrument, we believe, of 
the kind, — so called, perhaps, from its being 
chiefly played upon by young women, or 
because it was used in singing hymns to the 
Virgin. Spenser has mentioned it in an 
English Trimeter-Iambic ; one of those fantastic 
attempts to introduce the uncongenialities of 
Latin versification, which the taste of the great 
poet soon led him to abandon. The line, 
however, in which the virginals are men- 
tioned, presents a picture not unworthy of 
him. His apostrophe, at the outset, to his 
" unhappie verse," contains an involuntary 
satire : 

" Unhappie Verse! the witnesse of my unhappie state, 
Make thyself fiutt'ring wings of thy fast-flying 
Thought, and fly forth unto my Love whersoever she he ; 
Whether lying restless in heavy bedde, or else 
Sitting so cheerelesse at the cheerfull boarde, or else 
Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie virginals." 

Queen Elizabeth is on record as having 
played on the virginals. It has been supposed 
by some that the instrument took its name 
from her ; but it is probably older. The musi- 
cal instrument mentioned in one of Shak- 
speare's sonnets is of the same keyed family. 
What a complete feeling of the andante, or 
going movement (as the Italians call it), is 
there in the beautiful line which we have 
marked ! and what a pleasant mixture of 
tenderness and archness throughout ! 

" How oft when thou, my music, music play'st 
Upon that blessed wood, whose motion sounds 
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st 
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, 



Do I envy those jacks, that nimble leap 

To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, 

Whilst my poor lips, that should that harvest reap, 

At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand ! 

To be so tickled, they would change their state 

And situation with those dancing chips 

O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait ! 

Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, 

Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss." 

Thus we have two out of our great poets, 
Spenser and Shakspeare, showing us the delight 
they took in the same species of instrument 
which we have now, and so bringing them- 
selves near to our Piano-fortes. 

" Still virginalling 
Upon his palm—" 

says the jealous husband in the " "Winter's 
Tale." Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and 
Milton, all mention the organ. Chaucer speaks 
of several instruments, but we cannot trace to 
him any other keyed one. It is rather surprising 
that the poets, considering the love of music 
natural to them, and their frequent mention 
of the art, have spoken of so few musical 
instruments — at least as if conversant with 
them in their houses. Milton was an organ- 
player, and Gay a flute-player (how like the 
difference of their genius !) Thomson pos- 
sessed an iEolian harp, of which he seems to 
have been very fond. He has addressed an 
ode to it (from which the verses have been 
set to music, beginning 

" Methinks I hear the full celestial choir ;") 

and has again mentioned the instrument in 
his " Castle of Indolence," a most fit place 
for it. 

All the truest lovers of any one art admire 
the other arts. Farinelli had several harpsi- 
chords to which he gave the names of painters, 
according to their respective qualities, — calling 
one his Raphael, another his Correggio, &c. 
And the exquisite little painting, by Annibal 
Carracci, in the British Gallery, of " Silenus 
teaching Apollo to play the pan-pipe" (together 
with a companion picture hanging near it) is 
said to have formed one of the compartments 
of the harpsichord belonging to that great 
painter. This is the natural magnificence of 
genius, which thinks no ornaments too precious 
for the objects of its love. We should like to 
be rich enough to play at imitating these great 
men, and see how much we could do to aggran- 
dise a Piano-forte. Let us see : it should be 
of the most precious, aromatic wood ; the 
white keys, ivory (nothing can be better than 
that) ; the black, ebony ; the legs sculptured 
with foliage and Loves and Graces ; the pannels 
should all be Titians and Correggios ; the most 
exquisite verses out of the Poets should be 
carved between them ; an arabesque cabinet 
should stand near it, containing the finest com- 
positions ; and Rossini should come from Italy 
to play them, and Pasta to sing. 



WHY SWEET MUSIC PRODUCES SADNESS. 



27 



Meantime, what signifies all this luxury ? 
The soul of music is at hand, wherever there 
are keys and strings and loving fingers to 
touch them ; and this soul, which disposes us 
to fancy the luxury, enables us to do without 
it. We can enjoy it in vision, without the 
expense. 

We take the liberty of closing this article 
with two copies of verses, which two eminent 
living musicians, Messrs. Barnett and Novello, 
have done us the honour to set to music. The 
verses have been printed before, but many of 
our readers will not have seen them. We did 
not think it possible for any words of our own 
to give us so much pleasure in the repetition, 
as when we heard her father's composition 
sung by the pure and most tuneful voice of 
Miss Clara Novello (Clara is she well named) ; 
and the reader may see what is thought of Mr. 
Barnett's powers, by musical judges, in a criti- 
cism upon it in a late number of " The Atlas," 
or another in a new cheap periodical publica- 
tion, called " The Englishwoman," heiress to 
the graces and good stock of her deceased 
parents, " The Ladies' Gazette " and " The 
Penny Novelist," and uniting them both to 
better advantage : — 

THOUGHTS ON HEARING SOME BEAUTIFUL MUSIC. 

(Set to music by Vincent Novello.) 

When lovely sounds about my ears 
Like winds in Eden's tree-tops rise, 

And make me, though my spirit hears, 
For very luxury close my eyes : 

Let none but friends be round about, 
Who love the smoothing joy like me, 

That so the charm be felt throughout, 
And all be harmony. 

And when we reach the close divine, 

Then let the hand of her I love 
Come with its gentle palm on mine, 

As soft as snow, or lighting dove ; 
And let, by stealth, that more than friend 

Look sweetness in my opening eyes ; 
For only so such dreams should end, 
Or wake in Paradise. 



THE LOVER OF MUSIC TO HIS PIANO-FORTE. 

(From Barnett's " Lyrical Illustrations of the Modern 
Poets.") 

friend, whom glad or grave we seek, 
Heaven-holding shrine ! 

1 ope thee, touch thee, hear thee speak, 

And peace is mine. 
No fairy casket, full of bliss, 

Out-values thee ; 
Love only, waken'd with a kiss, 

More sweet may be. 

To thee, when our full hearts o'erflow 

In griefs or joys, 
Unspeakable emotions owe 

A fitting voice : 
Mirth flies to thee, and Love's unrest, 

And Memory dear, 
And Sorrow, with his tighten'd breast, 

Comes for a tear. 



Oh, since no joy of human mould 

Thus waits us still, 
Thrice bless'd be thine, thou gentle fold 

Of peace at will. 
No change, no sullenness, no cheat, 

In thee we find ; 
Thy saddest voice is ever sweet, — 

Thine answer, kind. 



XLVI.— WHY SWEET MUSIC PRODUCES 

SADNESS. 

Sweet music, that is to say, "sweet" in the 
sense in which it is evidently used in the 
following passage, — something not of a mirth- 
ful character, but yet not of a melancholy one, 
— does not always produce sadness ; but it does 
often, even when the words, if it be vocal 
music, are cheerful. We do not presume to 
take for granted, that the reason we are about 
to differ with, or perhaps rather to extend, is 
Shakspeare's own, or that he would have 
stopped thus short, if speaking in his own 
person ; though he has given it the air of an 
abstract remark ; — but Lorenzo, in " The Mer- 
chant of Venice," says, that it is because our 
"spirits are attentive." 

" I'm never merry when I hear sweet music," 

says pretty Jessica. 

" The reason is, your spirits are attentive," 

says her lover ; 

" For do but note a wild and wanton herd, 
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts, 
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, 
Which is the hot condition of their blood ; 
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, 
Or any air of music touch their ears, 
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, 
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze, 
By the sweet power of music." 

How beautiful ! But with the leave of this 
young and most elegant logician, his reason is, 
at least, not sufficient ; for how does it account 
for our being moved, even to tears, by music 
which is not otherwise melancholy ? All 
attention, it is true, implies a certain degree 
of earnestness, and all earnestness has a mix- 
ture of seriousness ; yet seriousness is not the 
prevailing character of attention in all instances, 
for we are attentive to fine music, whatever its 
character ; and sometimes it makes us cheer- 
ful, and even mirthful. The giddier portions 
of Rossini's music do not make us sad ; 
Figaro does not make us sad ; nor is sadness 
the general consequence of hearing dances, or 
even marches. 

And yet, again, on the other hand, in the 
midst of any of this music, even of the most 
light and joyous, our eyes shall sometimes fill 
with tears. How is this * 

The reason surely is, that we have an in- 
stinctive sense of the fugitive and perishing 



28 



DANCING AND DANCERS. 



nature of all sweet things, — of beauty, of youth, 
of life, — of all those fair shows of the world, of 
which music seems to be the voice, and of 
whose transitory nature it reminds us most 
when it is most beautiful, because it is then 
that we most regret our mortality. 

We do not, it is true, smj this to ourselves. 
We are not conscious of the reason ; that is 
to say, we do not feel it with knomngness ; but 
we do feel it, for the tears are moved. And 
how many exquisite criticisms of tears and 
laughter do not whole audiences make at plays, 
though not one man in fifty shall be able to 
put down his reasons for it on paper ? 



XLVIT.— DANCING AND DANCERS. 

While Tory genius boasts of its poetic 
Wilson, and ornithology of another, and the 
fine arts of Wilson " the English Claude," the 
minor graces insist upon having their Wilson 
too in the person of the eminent Mr. Thomas 
Wilson, author of several dramatic pieces, and 
inductor of ladies and gentlemen into the 
shapely and salutary art of dancing. 

This old, though doubtless at the same time 
ever-young acquaintance of ours, who has done 
us the honour for several years past of making 
us acquainted with his movements, and inviting 
us to his balls, which it has not been our good 
fortune to be able to attend, always sends us, 
with his invitations, a placard of equal wit and 
dimensions, in which he takes patriotic occa- 
sion to set forth the virtues of his art. He 
does not affect to despise its ordinary profits, 
in come- wards. That would be a want of can- 
dour, unbefitting the entireness of his wisdom. 
On the contrary, dancing being a liberal art, 
he is studious to inculcate an equally liberal 
acknowledgment on the part of those who are 
indebted to it. But being a man of a reflective 
turn of leg, and great animal spirits, he omits 
no opportunity of showing how good his art 
is for the happiness as well as the graces of 
his countrymen — how it renders them light of 
spirit as well as body, shakes melancholy out 
of their livers, and will not at all suffer them 
to be gouty. Nay, he says it is their own faults 
if they grow old. 

We hardly dare to introduce, abruptly, the 
remarks on this head which form the com- 
mencement of his present year's Expose. But 
the energy of Mr. Wilson's philanthropy forces 
its way through his elegances ; the good to be 
done is a greater thing in his mind, even than 
the graces with which he invests it ; and in 
answer to his question, "Why don't everybody 
dance ?" he says in a passion of sincerity which 
sweeps objection away with it, — " Because the 
English prefer the pleasures of the table and 
sedentary amusements, with their gout, apo- 
plexy, shortness of breath, spindle-shanks, and 



rum-puncheon bellies," (pardon us, O Bacchus 
of Anacreon !) " to the more wholesome and 
healthy recreation of dancing. If you ask 
a person of fifty (says he) to take a dance, the 
usual reply is, ' My dancing days are gone by ; 
it's not fit amusement for people of my time 
of life,' and such like idle cant : for idle cant it 
really is, as these pretences are either made 
as excuses for idleness, or to comply with the 
usual fastidious customs of the day. They 
manage things better in France, as Yorick 
says ; for it would be quite as difficult, amongst 
that polite and social people, to find a person 
of fifty who did not dance, as it is in gloomy, 
cold, calculating Old England, to find one who 
has good sense enough to laugh at these fas- 
tidious notions, with a sufficient stock of social 
animal spirits to share in this polite and ex- 
hilarating amusement. Moreover, if we wanted 
a sanction to continue to dance as long as we 
are able, I could here give a list (had I room) 
of a hundred eminent persons who did not 
consider it a disgrace to dance, even at a very 
advanced age ; amongst the number, Socrates, 
one of the wisest men and greatest philosophers 
that ever lived, used to dance for his exercise 
and amusement when he was upwards of 
seventy. Read this, ye gourmands and card- 
players of fifty ; and if you are wise, an would 
leave the gout and a thousand other ills 
beside you, come and sport a toe with me, at 18, 
Kirby-street Hatton-garden : 

For you'll meet many there, who to doctors ne'er go, 
Who enjoy health and spirit, from sporting a toe ; 
Who neither want powder, pill, mixture, nor lotion, 
But a partner and fiddle to set them in motion." 

Truly, we fear that the tip-end of Mr. 
Wilson's indignant bow strikes hard upon 
many a venerable gout ; and that these dan- 
cing philosophers of Kirby-street have the 
advantage of a great many otherwise sage 
people who take pills instead of exercise, and 
think to substitute powders and lotions for 
those more ancient usages, yclept the laws of 
the universe. Such, as Mr. Wilson tells us, 
was the philosophy of Socrates. There can 
be no doubt of it ; it was the philosophy of all 
his countrymen, the Greeks, with whom dan- 
cing formed a part of their very worship, and 
who had figures accordingly, fit to go to church 
and thank Heaven with. Bacchus himself, 
with them, was a dancer, and a slender-waisted 
young gentleman. Such was also the philo- 
sophy of Mr. Wilson's brother poet, Soame 
Jenyns, a lively old gentleman of the last 
century, who wrote a poem on the "Art of 
Dancing," from which Mr. Wilson should give 
us some extracts in his next placard ; (we 
wish we had it by us ;) and what is curious, 
and shows how accustomed these saltatory 
sages are to consider the interests of the 
whole human being, spiritual as well as bodily, 
Mr. Jenyns had a poetical precursor on that 



DANCING AND DANCERS. 



29 



subject, who was no less a personage than a 
chief-justice in the time of Elizabeth, — Sir John 
Davies,and who, like himself, wrote also on reli- 
gious matters, and the Immortality of the Soul. 
Sir John, however, appears not to have suffi- 
ciently practised his own precepts, for he died 
of apoplexy at fifty-seven, — a very crude and 
juvenile age according to a Mr. Wilson. But 
then he was a lawyer, and injudicious enough 
to be a judge, — to sit bundled up in cloth 
and ermine, instead of dancing in a " light 
cymar." Again, there was Sir Christopher 
Hatton, chancellor in the time of Elizabeth, 
who is said to have absolutely danced himself 
into that venerable position, through a series 
of extraordinary steps of court favour, com- 
mencing in a ball-room, — and not improbably 
either ; for, like some of his great brethren in 
that office, Sir Christopher appears to have been 
a truly universal genius, able," like the elephant's 
trunk," to pick up his pin as well as knock 
down his tiger; and it is not to be wondered at 
if sovereigns sometimes get at a knowledge of 
the profounder faculties of a man, through the 
medium of his more entertaining ones. The 
Chancellor, however, appears to have turned his 
dancing to no better account, ultimately, than 
the Justice ; for they say he died prematurely of 
a broken heart, because the queen pressed 
him for a debt, — an end worthier of a courtier, 
than of a sage and dancer. This it is to 
acquire legal habits, and "make the worse 
appear the better reason," even to one's-self. 
Hatton should have been above his law, and 
stuck to his legs, — to his natural understanding, 
as Mr. "Wilson would call it ; and then nothing 
would have overthrown him. Gray, with a 
poet's license, represents him as dancing after 
he was chancellor. It is a pity it was not 
true. 

My grave lord-keeper led the brawls ; 
His seal and maces danced before him. 
His high-crown'd hat and satin doublet 
Moved the stout heart of England's queen, 
Though Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it. 

Sir Christopher bequeathed his name to 
Hatton-garden ; so that Mr. Wilson resides 
in a fit neighbourhood, and doubtless has 
visions of cavaliers and maids of honour in 
ruffs, "sporting their toes" through his dreams 
by night. 

Our artist's vindication of the juvenility of 
dancers at fifty, reminds us of a pleasant real- 
ization we experienced the other day of a 
stage joke — nay, of a great improvement on it, 
— a Romance of Real Life! In one of Colman's 
farces, an old man hearing another called old, 
and understanding he was only forty, exclaims 
" Forty! quite a boy!" We heard this opinion 
pronounced upon a man of sixty by an old gen- 
tleman, who, we suppose, must be eighty, or 
thereabouts. It was in an omnibus, in which 
he was returning from a City dinner, jovial 
and toothless, his rosy gills gracing his white 



locks ; an Anacreon in broad-cloth. Some 
friend of his was telling him of the death of an 
acquaintance, and in answer to his question 
respecting the cause of it, said he did not 
know, but that the deceased was " sixty years 
of age." The remark seemed hardly to be an 
indiscretion in the ears of the venerable old 
boy, he considered it so very inapplicable. 
" Sixty !" cried he, with a lisp that was really 
robust ; " well, that's nothing, you know, com- 
pared with life. Why, he was quite a boy." 

Wilson. This must have been a dancer. 

Seer. Or a rider. 

W. Well, horseback is a kind of dancing. 

Seer. Or a walker. 

W. Well, walking is dancing too ; that is to 
say, good walking. You know, my dear sir, 
people are said to " walk a minuet." 

Seer. But they say dancers are not good 
walkers. 

W. How ! Dancers not good walkers ! ! 
It is true, I must allow in candour, that some 
professional dancers are apt to turn out their 
toes a little too much ; but not all, my dear 
sir — not the best : and, as to dancers in gene- 
ral, I will affirm, meo peiicido, as the philoso- 
pher says, they walk exquisitely — a merveille. 
Come and see my dancers walking into the 
ball-room, or my new dance of the " Rival 
Beauties ; " " thirty young ladies," sir, all 
moving to the sweet and peaceful battle at 
once. See how they walk, my dear sir. You 
would never forget it. 

Seer. I shall never forget it, as it is, Mr. 
Wilson. I see it, in imagination, painted 
in the beautiful red letters of your placard, 
and do not wonder that you are a man in re- 
quest for Richmond parties, and records of it 
in verse. 

Here Mr. Wilson finishes the dialogue with 
a bow to which it would be bad taste and an 
anti-climax to reply. There is a final and tri- 
umphant silence of eloquence, to which nothing 
can be said. 

To return to the matter of age. There can 
be no doubt that dancers of fifty are a very 
different sort of quinquagenarians from sitters 
of fifty, and that men of the same age often 
resemble each other in no other respect. "The 
same is not the same." Some people may 
even be said to have begun life over again, at 
a time when the dissipated and the sullen are 
preparing to give it up. It is not necessary 
to mention such cases as those of Old Parr. 
Marmontel — a man of letters, of taste and 
fancy, and therefore, it is to be presumed, of 
no very coarse organisation — married at fifty- 
six, and, after living happily with a family 
born to him, died at the age of seventy-seven. 
But, though a man of letters, and living at a 
period when there was great license of man- 
ners, to which his own had formed no very rigid 
exception — he had led, upon the whole, a 
natural life, and was temperate. Besides, 



30 



DANCING AND DANCERS. 



Nature is very indulgent to those who do not 
violently contradict her with artificial habits, 
excesses of the table, or sullen thoughts. 
She hates alike the extremes, not of cheer- 
fulness, but of Comus and of Melancholy. 
A venerable peer of Norfolk, now living, 
married and had an heir born to his estate 
at a venerable age, which nobody thought 
of treating with jests of a certain kind ; for 
he also had been a denizen of the natural 
world, and was as young, with good sense 
and exercise, as people of half his age — far 
younger than many. We remember the face 
of envying respect and astonishment with 
which the news was received by "a per- 
son of wit and honour about town" (now 
deceased,) in whose company we happened to 
be at the moment, and who might have been 
his son three or four times over. 

Query — at what age must a person take to 
venerable manners, and consent to look old if 
he does not feel so ? Mr. "Wilson will say, 
"When he is forced to leave off dancing." And 
there is a definite notion in that. If any one, 
therefore, wishes to have precise ideas on this 
point, and behave himself as becomes his real, 
not his chronological time of life, we really 
think he cannot do better than study in Kirby- 
street, or at Willis's, and learn to know at 
what age it becomes him to be reverend, or 
how long he may continue laughing at those 
who remonstrate with him because they hobble. 
Linnaeus, in his Travels, gives an account — ludi- 
crous in the eyes of us spectators of the staid 
and misgiving manners of people at the same 
time of life — of two Laplanders who accom- 
panied him on some occasion — we forget what, 
but who carried bundles for him, and had 
otherwise reason for being tired, the way 
being long. One of them was fifty, the other 
considerably older ; yet what did these old 
boys at the close of their journey, but, instead 
of sitting down and resting themselves, begin 
laughing and running about after one another, 
like a couple of antediluvian children, as if 
they had just risen ! They wanted nothing 
but pinafores, and a mother remonstrating 
with them for not coming and having their 
hairs combed. 

Most people are astonished, perhaps, as they 
advance beyond the period of youth and middle 
life, at not finding themselves still older ; and 
if they took wise advantage of this astonish- 
ment, they would all live to a much greater 
age. It is equally by not daring to be too 
young, nor consenting to be too old, that men 
keep themselves in order with Nature, and 
in heart with her. We kill ourselves before 
our time, with artificial irregularities and 
melancholy resentments. We hasten age 
with late hours, and the table, and want of 
exercise ; and hate it, and make it worse 
when it comes, with bad temper and inactive 
regrets. 



A boy of ten thinks he shall be in the prime 
of life when he is twenty, and (as lives go) he 
is so ; though, when he comes to be twenty, 
he shoves oif his notion of the prime to thirty, 
then to thirty-five, then to forty ; and when, at 
length, he is forced to own himself no longer 
young, he is at once astonished to think he has 
been young so long, and angry to find himself 
no younger. This would be hardly fair upon 
the indulgence of Nature, if Nature supplied 
us with education as well as existence, and 
the world itself did not manifestly take time 
to come to years of discretion. In the early 
ages of the world, the inability to lead artifi- 
cial lives was the great cause of longevity ; as 
in future ones, it is to be hoped, the apprecia- 
tion of the natural life will bring men round 
to it. It would have put the pastoral, patriar- 
chal people sadly out, to keep late hours at 
night, and to sit after dinner " pushing about " 
the milk! 

Nature, in the mean time, acts with her 
usual good-natured instinct, and makes the 
best of a bad business ; rather, let us say, pro- 
duces it in order to produce a better, and to 
enable us to improve upon her early world. 
She has even something good to say in behalf 
of the ill-health of modern times and the rich 
delicacy of its perceptions ; so that we might 
be warranted in supposing that she is ever 
improving, even when she least appears to be 
so ; and that your pastoral longevity, though a 
good pattern in some respects for that which 
is to come, had but a poor milk-and-water 
measure of happiness, compared with the 
wine and the intellectual movement of us inter- 
mediate stragglers. At all events, the mea- 
sure, somehow or other, may be equal — and 
the difference only a variety of sameness. And 
there is as much comfort in that reflection, 
and a great difficulty solved in it. Only 
Nature, after all, still incites us to look for- 
ward ; and, whether it be for the sake of real 
or of apparent change, forward we must look, 
and look heartily, taking care to realise all 
the happiness we can, as we go. This seems 
the true mode of keeping all our faculties in 
action — all the inevitable thoughts given to 
man, of past, present, and future ; and with 
this grave reflection we conclude our present 
dance under Mr. Wilson's patronage, gravely 
as well as gaily recommending his very useful 
art, to all lovers of health, grace, and soci- 
ality. 

Why do not people oftener get up dances at home, 
and icithout waiting for the ceremony of visitors and 
the drawback of late hours ? It would be a great 
addition to the cheerfulness and health of 
families. 



TWELFTH NIGHT. 



31 



XLVIII TWELFTH NIGHT. 

A STREET PORTRAIT. SHAKSPEARE'S PLAY. RECOLLECTIONS 
OF A TWELFTH NIGHT. 

Christmas goes out in fine style, — with 
Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the 
time. Christmas Day was the morning of the 
season ; New Year's Day the middle of it, or 
noon ; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant 
with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. 
The whole island keeps court ; nay, all Chris- 
tendom. All the world are kings and queens. 
Everybody is somebody else ; and learns at once 
to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different 
from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, 
characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry 
rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, 
the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat 
but so fine to look at, useful because it is per- 
fectly useless except for a sight and a moral, — 
all conspire to throw a giddy splendour over 
the last night of the season, and to send it to 
bed in pomp and colours, like a Prince. 

And not the least good thing in Twelfth Night 
is, that we see it coming for days beforehand, 
in the cakes that garnish the shops. We are 
among those who do not "like a surprise," 
except in dramas (and not too much of it even 
there, nor unprepared with expectation). We 
like to know of the good things intended for 
us. It adds the pleasure of hope to that of 
possession. Thus we eat our Twelfth-cake 
many times in imagination, before it comes. 
Every pastry-cook's shop we pass, flashes it 
upon us. 

Coming Ttvelfth-cakes cast their shadows before ; 

if shadows they can be called, which shade 
have none ; so full of colour are they, as if 
Titian had invented them. Even the little 
ragged boys, who stand at those shops by the 
hour, admiring the heaven within, and are des- 
tined to have none of it, get, perhaps, from 
imagination alone, a stronger taste of the beati- 
tude, than many a richly- fed palate, which is at 
the mercy of some particular missing relish, 
— some touch of spice or citron, or a "leetle 
more" egg. 

We believe we have told a story of one of 
those urchins before, but it will bear repetition, 
especially as a strong relish of it has come upon 
us, and we are tempted to relate it at greater 
length. There is nothing very wonderful or 
epigrammatic in it, but it has to do with the 
beatific visions of the pastry-shops. Our hero 
was one of those equivocal animal- spirits of 
the streets, who come whistling along, you 
know not whether thief or errand-boy, some- 
times with bundle and sometimes not, in 
corduroys, a jacket, and a cap or bit of hat, 
with hair sticking through a hole in it. His 
vivacity gets him into scrapes in the street, 
and he is not ultra-studious of civility in his 
answers. If the man he runs against is not 



very big, he gives him abuse for abuse at once ; 
if otherwise, he gets at a convenient distance, 
and then halloos out, " Eh, stupid !" or " Can't 
you see before you?" or "Go, and get your 
face washed." This last is a favourite saying 
of his, out of an instinct referable to his own 
visage. He sings " Hokee-pokee " and a "Shiny 
Night," varied occasionally with an uproarious 
" Rise, gentle Moon," or " Coming through the 
Rye." On winter evenings, you may hear him 
indulging himself, as he goes along, in a singular 
undulation of howl ; — a sort of gargle, — as if a 
wolf were practising the rudiments of a shake. 
This he delights to do more particularly in a 
crowded thoroughfare, as though determined 
that his noise should triumph over every other, 
and show how jolly he is, and how independent 
of the ties to good behaviour. If the street is a 
quiet one,andhe has a stick in his hand (perhaps 
a hoop-stick), he accompanies the howl with a 
run upon the gamut of the iron rails. He is 
the nightingale of mud and cold. If he gets 
on in life, he will be a pot-boy. At present, 
as we said before, we hardly know what he is ; 
but his mother thinks herself lucky if he is not 
transported. 

Well ; one of these elves of the pave — per- 
plexers of Lord Mayors, and irritators of the 
police — was standing one evening before a 
pastry-cook's shop- window, flattening his nose 
against the glass, and watching the movements 
of a school-boy who was in the happy agony of 
selecting the best bun. He had stood there 
ten minutes before the boy came in, and had 
made himself acquainted with all the eatables 
lying before him, and wondered at the slowness, 
and apparent indifference, of jaws masticating 
tarts. His interest, great before, is now in- 
tense. He follows the new-comer's eye and 
hand, hither and thither. His own arm feels 
like the other's arm. He shifts the expression 
of his mouth and the shrug of his body, at 
every perilous approximation which the chooser 
makes to a second-rate bun. He is like a 
bowler following the nice inflections of the bias ; 
for he wishes him nothing but success ; the 
occasion is too great for envy ; he feels all 
the generous sympathy of a knight of old, 
when he saw another within an ace of winning 
some glorious prize, and his arm doubtful of 
the blow. 

At length the awful decision is made, and the 
bun laid hands on. 

" Yah ! you fool," exclaims the watcher, 
bursting with all the despair and indigna- 
tion of knowing boyhood, "you have left the 



Twelfth-cake and its king and queen are in 
honour of the crowned heads who are said to 
have brought presents to Jesus in his cradle 
— a piece of royal service not necessary to be 
believed in by good Christians, though very 
proper to be maintained among the gratuitous 
decorations with which good and poetical 



32 



TWELFTH NIGHT. 



hearts willingly garnish their faith. " The 
Magi, or "Wise Men, are vulgarly called (says 
a note in * Brand's Popular Antiquities/ 
quarto edition by Ellis, p. 19) the three kings 
of Collen (Cologne). The first, named Melchior, 
an aged man with a long beard, offered gold ; 
the second, Jasper, a beardless youth, offered 
frankincense ; the third, Balthaser, a black or 
Moor, with a large spreading beard, offered 
myrrh." This picture is full of colour, and 
has often been painted. The word Epiphany 

| (Em<t>avua, superapparitio, an appearance from 
above), alludes to the star which is described 
in the Bible as guiding the Wise Men. In 
Italy, the word has been corrupted into Beffania, 
or Beffana, (as in England it used to be called, 
Piffany) ; and Beffana, in some parts of that 
country, has come to mean an old fairy, or 
Mother Bunch, whose figure is carried about 
the streets, and who rewards or punishes 
children at night by putting sweetmeats, or 
stones and dirt, into a stocking hung up for 
the purpose near the bed's head. The word 
Befa, taken from this, familiarly means a trick 
or mockery put upon any one : — to such base 
uses may come the most splendid terms ! 
Twelfth Day, like the other old festivals of the 
church of old, has had a link of connexion 
found for it with Pagan customs, and has been 
traced to the Saturnalia of the ancients, when 
people drew lots for imaginary kingdoms. Its 
observation is still kept up, with more or less 
ceremony, all over Christendom. In Paris, 

i they enjoy it with their usual vivacity. The 
king there is chosen, not by drawing a paper 
as with us, but by the lot of a bean which falls 
to him, and which is put into the cake ; and 
great ceremony is observed when the king or the 
queen " drink ;" which once gave rise to a jest, 
that occasioned the damnation of a play of 
Voltaire's. The play was performed at this 
season, and a queen in it having to die by 
poison, a wag exclaimed with Twelfth Night 
solemnity, when her Majesty was about to 
take it, " The queen drinks." The joke was 
infectious ; and the play died, as well as the 
poor queen. 

Many a pleasant Twelfth Night have we 
passed in our time ; and such future Twelfth 
Nights as may remain to us shall be pleasant, 
God and good-will permitting : for even if 
care should be round about them, we have no 
notion of missing these mountain-tops of rest 
and brightness, on which people may refresh 
themselves during the stormiest parts of life's 
voyage. Most assuredly will we look forward 
to them, and stop there when we arrive, as 
though we had not to begin buffeting again 
the next day. No joy or consolation that heaven 
or earth affords us will we ungratefully pass by ; 
but prove, by our acceptance and relish of it, 
that it is what it is said to be, and that we de- 
serve to have it. " The child is father to the 
man ;" and a very foolish-grown boy he is, and 



unworthy of his sire, if he is not man enough 
to know when to be like him. What ! shall 
he go and sulk in a corner, because life is not 
just what he would have it ? Or shall he dis- 
cover that his dignity will not bear the shaking 
of holiday merriment, being too fragile and 
likely to tumble to pieces ? Or lastly, shall he 
take himself for too good and perfect a person 
to come within the chance of contamination 
from a little ultra life and Wassail-bowl, and 
render it necessary to have the famous 
question thrown at his stately and stupid 
head — 

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall 
be no more cakes and ale ? " 

This passage is in " Twelfth Night," the last 
play (be it never forgotten)*" which Shakspeare 
is understood to have written, and which shows 
how in his beautiful and universal mind the 
belief in love, friendship and joy, and all good 
things, survived his knowledge of all evil, — 
affording us an everlasting argument against the 
conclusions of minor men of the world, and 
enabling the meanest of us to dare to avow the 
same faith. 

Here is another lecture to false and tin- j 
seasonable notions of gravity, in the same 
P ] ay — 

"I protest (quoth the affected steward Malvolio) I take 
these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools, to 
be no better than the fools' zanies. 

"Oh (says the Lady Olivia), you are sick of self-love, 
Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be 
generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those 
things for bird-bolts, that you deem cannon-bullets." 

This is the play in which are those beautiful 
passages about music, love, friendship, &c, 
which have as much of the morning of life 
in them as any that the great poet ever 
wrote, and are painted with as rosy and wet a 
pencil : — 

" If music be the food of love," &c. 
" Away before me to sweet beds of flowers ; 

Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers." 

" She never told her love, 
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, 
Feed on her damask cheek," &c. 

" I hate ingratitude more in a man," 

says the refined and exquisite Viola, 

" Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, 
Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption 
Inhabits our frail blood." 

And again, 

" In nature there's no blemish, but the mind 
[that is to say, the faults of the mind ;] 

None can be call'd deform 'd but the unkind." 

The play of " Twelfth Night," with proper good 
taste, is generally performed, at the theatres, 

* This opinion of Malone's has been ably set aside by 
Mr. Knight. The spirit of the Shakspearian wisdom still 
however remains. 



TWELFTH NIGHT. 



33 



on Twelfth Night. There is little or nothing 

belonging to the occasion in it, except a set 

of merry-makers who carouse all night, and 

sing songs enough to " draw three souls out of 

one weaver." It is evident that Shakspeare 

was at a loss for a title to his play, for he has 

called it, "Twelfth Night, or What You Will;" 

but the nocturnal revels reminded him of the 

I anniversary which, being the player and hu- 

. mourist that he was, and accustomed, doubtless, 

j to many a good sitting-up, appears to have 

I stood forth prominently among his recollections 

I of the year. So that it is probable he kept up 

his Twelfth Night to the last : — assuredly he 

kept up his merry and romantic characters, 

his Sir Tobies and his Violas. And, keeping 

up his stage faith so well, he must needs have 

kept vip his home faith. He could not have 

done it otherwise. He would invite his Stratford 

friends to " king and queen," and, however he 

might have looked in face, would still have felt 

young in heart towards the budding daughters 

of his visitors, the possible Violas perhaps of 

some love-story of their own. and not more 

innocent in " the last recesses of the mind " 

than himself. 

We spent a Twelfth Night once, which, by 

; common consent of the parties concerned, was 

I afterwards known by the name of the Twelfth 

i Night. It was doubted among us, not merely 

! whether ourselves, but whether anybody else, 

ever had such a Twelfth Night ; — 

' ' For never since created cake, 
Met such untiring force, as named with these 
Could merit more than that small infantry, 
Which goes to bed betimes." 

The evening began with such tea as is worth 
j mention, for we never knew anybody make it 
i like the maker. Dr. Johnson would have 
given it his placidest growl of approbation. 
j Then, with piano-forte, violin, and violoncello, 
J came Handel, Corelli, and Mozart. Then 
j followed the drawing for king and queen, in 
order that the "small infantry" might have 
their due share of the night, without sitting 
up too too-late (for a reasonable "too-late" is 
to be allowed once and away). Then games, 
of all the received kinds, forgetting no branch 
of Christmas customs. And very good extem- 
pore blank verse was spoken by some of the 
court (for our characters imitated a court), 
not unworthy of the wit and dignity of Tom 
Thumb. Then came supper, and all characters 
were soon forgotten but the feasters' own ; 
good and lively souls, and festive all, both 
male and female, — with a constellation of the 
brightest eyes that we had ever seen met 
together. This fact was so striking, that a 
burst of delighted assent broke forth, when 
Moore's charming verses were struck up, — 

" To ladies' eyes a round, boys, 

We can't refuse, we can't refuse ; 
For bright eyes so abound, boys, 

'Tis hard to choose, 'tis hard to choose." 



The bright eyes, the beauty, the good humour, 
the wine, the wit, the poetry (for we had 
celebrated wits and poets among us, as well as 
charming women), fused all hearts together in 
one unceasing round of fancy and laughter, 
till breakfast, — to which we adjourned in a 
room full of books, the authors of which might 
almost have been waked up and embodied, to 
come among us. Here, with the bright eyes 
literally as bright as ever at six o'clock in the 
morning (we all remarked it), we merged one 
glorious day into another, as a good omen (for 
it was also fine weather, though in January) ; 
and as luck and our good faith would have it, 
the door was no sooner opened to let forth the 
ever-joyous visitors, than the trumpets of a 
regiment quartered in the neighbourhood 
struck up into the morning air, seeming to 
blow forth triumphant approbation, and as if 
they sounded purely to do us honour, and to 
say, " You are as early and untired as we." 

We do not recommend such nights to be 
" resolved on," much less to be made a system 
of regular occurrence. They should flow out 
of the impulse, as this did ; for there was no 
intention of sitting up so late. But so genuine 
was that night, and so true a recollection of 
pleasure did it leave upon the minds of all 
who shared it, that it has helped to stamp a 
seal of selectness upon the house in which it 
was passed, and which, for the encouragement 
of good-fellowship and of humble aspirations 
towards tree-planting, we are here incited to 
point out ; for by the same token the writer 
of these papers planted some plane-trees with- 
in the rails by the garden-gate (selecting the 
plane in honour of the Genius of Domesticity, 
to which it was sacred among the Greeks) ; 
and anybody who does not disdain to look at 
a modest tenement for the sake of the happy 
hours that have been spent in it, may know it 
by those trees, as he passes along the row of 
houses called York Buildings, in the New 
Road, Marylebone. A man may pique himself 
without vanity upon having planted a tree ; 
and, humble as our performance has been 
that way, we confess we are glad of it, and 
have often looked at the result with pleasure. 
The reader would smile, perhaps sigh (but a 
pleasure would or should be at the bottom of 
his sigh), if he knew what consolation we had 
experienced in some very trying seasons, 
merely from seeing those trees growing up, 
and affording shade and shelter to passengers, 
as well as a bit of leafiness to the possessor 
of the house. Every one should plant a tree who can*. 
It is one of the cheapest, as well as easiest, 
of all tasks : and if a man cannot reckon 
upon enjoying the shade much himself (which 
is the reason why trees are not planted every- 
where), it is surely worth while to bequeath 
so pleasant and useful a memorial of himself 

* Young trees from nursery-grounds are very cheap, 
and cost less than flowers. 

n 



34 



THE ART OF MAKING PRESENTS. 



to others. They are green footsteps of our 
existence, which show that we have not lived 
in vain. 

" Dig a well, plant a tree, write a book, 
and go to heaven," says the Arabian proverb. 
We cannot exactly dig a well. The parish 
authorities would not employ us. Besides, 
wells are not so much wanted in England as 
in Arabia, nor books either ; otherwise we 
should be two-thirds on our road to heaven 
already. But trees are wanted, and ought to 
be wished for, almost everywhere ; especially 
amidst the hard brick and mortar of towns ; so 
that we may claim at least one-third of the 
way, having planted more than one tree in our 
time ; and if our books cannot wing our flight 
much higher (for they never pretended to be 
anything greater than birds singing among 
the trees), we have other merits, thank Heaven, 
than our own to go upon ; and shall endeavour 
to piece out our frail and most imperfect 
ladder, with all the good things we can love 
and admire in God's creation. 



XLIX.— RULES IN MAKING PRESENTS. 

If the present is to be very exquisite indeed, 
and no mortification will be mixed up with 
the receipt of it, out of pure inability to make 
an equal one, or from any other cause, the rule 
has often been laid down. It should be some- 
thing useful, beautiful, costly, and rare. It is 
generally an elegance, however, to omit the 
costliness. The rarity is the great point, because 
riches themselves cannot always command it, 
and the peculiarity of the compliment is the 
greater. Rare present to rare person. 

If you are rich, it is a good rule in general 
to make a rich present ; that is to say, one 
equal, or at least not dishonourable, to your 
means : otherwise you set your riches above 
your friendship and generosity ; which is a 
mean mistake. 

Among equals, it is a good rule not to 
exceed the equality of resources ; otherwise 
there is a chance of giving greater morti- 
fication than pleasure, unless to a mean mind ; 
and it does not become a generous one to 
care for having advantages over a mind like 
that. 

But a rich man may make a present far 
richer than can be made him in return, pro- 
vided the receiver be as generous and under- 
standing as he, and knows that there will be 
no mistake on either side. In this case, an 
opportunity of giving himself great delight 
is afforded to the rich man ; and he can 
only have, or bestow it, under those circum- 
stances. 

On the other hand, a poor man, if he is 
generous, and understood to be so, may make 
the very poorest of presents, and give it an 



exquisite value ; for his heart and his under- 
standing will accompany it ; and the very 
daring to send his straw, will show that he 
has a spirit above his means, and such as 
could bestow and enrich the costliest present. 
But the certainty of his being thus generous, 
and having this spirit, must be very great. It 
would be the miserablest and most despicable 
of all mistakes, and in all probability the most 
self-betraying too, to send a poor present under 
a shabby pretence. 

"With no sort of presents must there be 
pretence. People must not say (and say 
falsely) that they could get no other, or that 
they could afford no better ; nor must they 
affect to think better of the present than it is 
worth ; nor, above all, keep asking about it 
after it is given, — how you like it, whether you 
find it useful, &c. 

It is often better to give no present at all 
than one beneath your means ; — always, 
should there be a misgiving on the side of the 
bestower. 

One present in the course of a life is gene- 
rosity from some : from others it is but a 
sacrifice made to avoid giving more. 

To receive a present handsomely and in a 
right spirit, even when you have none to give 
in return, is to give one in return. 

We must not send presents to strangers 
(except of a very common and trifling nature, 
and not without some sort of warrant even then) 
unless we are sure of our own right and good 
motives in sending it, and of the right and 
inclination, too, which they would have to 
permit themselves to receive it ; otherwise we 
pay both parties a very ill compliment, and 
such as no modest and honourable spirit on 
either side would venture upon. There might, 
it is true, be a state of society in which such 
ventures would not be quite so hardy ; and it 
is possible, meanwhile, that a very young and 
enthusiastic nature, in its ignorance of the 
perplexities that at present beset the world, 
might here and there hazard it ; but probably 
a good deal of self-love would be mixed up 
with the proceeding. The only possible ex- 
ception would be in the case of a great and 
rare genius, which had a right to make laws to 
itself, and to suppose that its notice was ac- 
quaintanceship sufficient. 



L.— ROMANCE OF COMMON-PLACE. 

Every sentiment, or want of sentiment, 
pushed to excess, bears, from that excess, a 
character of romance ; even dulness may be 
romantic. We remember our late dear friend 
Charles Lamb, many years ago, giving us, with 
his exquisite tact, an account of a deceased 
acquaintance of his who carried "common- 
place" itself to a pitch of the « romantic," and 



AMIABLENESS SUPERIOR TO INTELLECT. 



35 



who would way-lay you for half-an-hour with 
a history of his having cut his finger, or mislaid 
a pair of shoes. This gentleman did not draw 
infinite somethings out of nothing, like the 
wits of the Lutrin or the Rape of the Loch, or 
the Italian expatiators upon a Cough or a 
Christian-name. He got hold of nothing, and 
out of it, with a congeniality of emptiness, 
drew nothing whatever. But it was he that 
drew the nothing, and you that listened to 
him ; and thus he got a sense of himself some- 
how. If you ran against him in the street, it 
was an event in his life, aDd enabled him to 
stand breathing, and smiling, and saying how 
much it did not signify, for the next intense 
five minutes. He once met a lady, an acquaint- 
ance of his, who was going to have a tooth 
drawn. 

Dear me, madam, and so you are going to 
have your tooth drawn ? 

Yes, sir. 

By Mr. Parkinson, I presume ? 

Yes. 

Dear me ! I fear you have suffered a good 
deal, madam ? 

Not a little, indeed. 

God bless me ! I am very sorry to hear it, 
— very sorry. How long, pray, may you have 
suffered this toothach ? 

I should think a week. 

God bless me ! A week ! That is a long 
time ! And by night as well as by day, I 
presume ? 

I have hardly had any sleep these two 
nights. 

Dear me ! That is very sad. God bless me ! 
No sleep for these two nights ! Want of sleep 
is a very sad thing, — highly distressing. I 
could not do without my regular sleep. No, 
no ; none of us can. It is highly undermining 
to the constitution. Produces such fatigue — 
such lassitude — such weariness. H'm ! h'm ! 
(Humming with a sort of sympathy and gentlemanly 
groan, as if his own face were bound up.) I see 
you are suffering now, madam ? 

It will be soon over now. 

hVm! You are very bold, madam, — very 
resolute ; but that is extremely sensible. hVm! 
Dear me ! And you have tried clove, I pre- 
sume, and all that ? 

Why, I am not young, and do not like to 
part with my teeth. 

Ah — oh — h'm! just so — very natural — ah — 
yes — dear me ! h'm ! A double tooth, I sup- 
pose ? 

(The lady nods.) 

Ah — afraid of the cold air — you are right 
not to open your mouth, madam. Cold gets 
in. Ah — h'm — yes — just so. (Nodding, bowing, 
and groaning.) 

(Lady turns to go up a court, and makes a gesture 
of bidding him good morning.) 

Oh — ah — dear me ! ay, this is the place — so 
it is — I wish you a happy release, madam — I 



hope the process will be easy — h'm ! ha-a-ah ! 
( Takes farewell between a sort of breath and a groan. 
Lady goes into the dentist's, has her tooth drawn, and 
on returning down the court is astonished to find 
the gentleman waiting at the corner, to congratulate 
Iter !)* 

Well, madam (bowing and smiling ), the tooth 
is drawn, I presume ? 

(Lady acquiesces.) 

Dear me ! ah ! — H'm ! — very painful, I fear 
— a long while drawing ? 

Lady. 'Tis out, at last. (Aside. I wonder 
when the man will have done with his 
absurdity.) 

A skilful dentist, Mr. Parkinson, madam ? 

(Lady acquiesces.) 

I have not been to a dentist myself these — 
let me see — ah, yes, it must be — now — these 
twenty years. I had one bad tooth, and caught 
a cold sitting in the draught of a coach — very 
dangerous thing — and chaises are worse — very 
dangerous things, chaises — h'm — very. You 
are suffering still, I see, madam ? from the 
ghost of the tooth, I presume ? (laughing) — but, 
dear me ! I am keeping you in the draught of 
this court, and you go the other way. Good 
morning, madam — Good morning — I wish you 
a very GOOD morning — Don't speak, I beg — 
GOOD morning. 

And so, thus heaping emphasis upon emphasis 
upon this very new valediction, and retaining 
a double smile amidst his good wishes, from 
his very new joke about the ghost of a tooth, 
our Hero of Common-place takes his leave. 



LI.— AMIABLENESS SUPERIOR TO 
INTELLECT. 

In our article upon the gossiping old gen- 
tleman who appeared to sympathise so exces- 
sively with the lady's toothach, we omitted to 
caution some of our readers against supposing 
that we were contradicting our usual sympa- 
thetic theories, and laughing at any innocent 
exemplification of them, however trivial. But 
though the gentleman was harmless, except 
in his tediousness, and not an ill-natured man, 
and did far better than if he had set himself 
to waste an equal portion of time in the 
manifestation of antipathy, yet sympathy was 
not the ground of his proceeding : it was pure 
want of ideas, and a sensation, — the necessity of 
killing time. We should not object even to any 
innocent mode of doing that, where a human 
being lives under a necessity so unfortunate, and 
has not the luck to be ahedger or ditcher: but 
it is desirable not to let sympathy be mistaken 
for something different from what it is, espe- 
cially where it takes a shape that is ridiculous. 

On the other hand, with regard to the com- 
mon-place of the matter, apart from an abso- 

* A fact. 



36 



AMIABLENESS SUPERIOR TO INTELLECT. 



lute extravagance of insipidity, far are we 
from wishing to treat common-places with 
derision, purely as such. They are the com- 
mon clay of which human intercourse is made, 
and therefore as respectable in our eyes as 
any other of the ordinary materials of our 
planet, however desirous we may be of warm- 
ing them into flowers. Nay, flowers they 
have, provided the clay be pure and kindly. 
The air of health and cheerfulness is over 
them. They are like the common grass, and 
the daisies and buttercups. Children have 
them ; and what children have, the most un- 
common grown people may envy, unless they 
have health and cheerfulness too. 

It is Sir Walter Scott, we believe, who has 
observed somewhere, that men of superior en- 
dowments, or other advantages, are accustomed 
to pay too little regard to the intercourse of their 
less gifted fellow-creatures, and to regret all 
the time that is passed in their company. He 
says they accustom themselves so much to the 
living upon sweets and spices, that they lose a 
proper relish for ordinary food, and grow con- 
temptuous of those who subsist upon it, to the 
injury of their own enjoyment. They keep 
their palate in a constant state of thirst and 
irritation, rather than of healthy satisfaction. 
And we recollect Mr. Hazlitt making a 
remark to a similar effect, namely, that the 
being accustomed to the society of men of 
genius renders the conversation of others tire- 
some, as consisting of a parcel of things that 
have been heard a thousand times, and from 
which no stimulus is to be obtained. He 
lamented this, as an effect unbecoming a re- 
flecting man and a fellow-creature (for though 
irritable, and sometimes resentful, his heart 
was large and full of humanity) ; and the 
consequence was, that nobody paid greater 
attention than he to common conversation, 
or showed greater respect towards any endea- 
vours to interest him, however trite. Youths 
of his acquaintance are fond of calling to mind 
the footing of equality on which he treated 
them, even when children, gravely inter- 
changing remarks with them, as he sat side 
by side, like one grown person with another, 
and giving them now and then (though with- 
out the pomp) a Johnsonian "Sir." The 
serious earnestness of his "Indeed, m'um!" 
with lifted eyebrows, and protruded lips, while 
listening to the surprising things told him 
by good housewives about their shopping or 
their preserves, is now sounding in our ears ; 
and makes us long to see again the splenetic 
but kindly philosopher, who worried himself 
to death about the good of the nations. 

There is but one thing necessary to put any 
reflecting person at his ease with common-place 
people ; and that is, their own cheerfulness and 
good-humour. To be able to be displeased, in 
spite of this, is to be insensible to the best 
results of wisdom itself. When all the Miss 



Smiths meet all the Miss Joneses, and there 
is nothing but a world of smiles, and recogni- 
tions, and gay breath, and loud askings after 
this person and that, and comparisons of bon- 
nets and cloaks, and "So glads!" and "So 
sorrys !" and rosy cheeks, or more lovely good- 
natured lips, who that has any good humour of 
his own, or power to extract a pleasant thought 
from pleasant things, desires wit or genius 
in this full-blown exhibition of comfortable 
humanity? He might as well be sullen at 
not finding wit or genius in a cart full of 
flowers, going along the street, or in the spring 
cry of " Primroses." 

A total want of ideas in a companion, or of 
the power to receive them, is indeed to be 
avoided by men who require intellectual ex- 
citement ; but it is a great mistake to suppose 
that the most discerning men demand intel- 
lect above everything else in their most habi- 
tual associates, much less in general inter- 
course. Happy would they be to see intellect 
more universally extended, but as a means, 
not as an end, — as a help to the knowledge 
of what is amiable, and not what is merely 
knowing. Clever men are sometimes said 
even to be jealous of clever companions, 
especially female ones. Men of genius, it is 
notorious, for a very different reason, and out 
of their own imagination of what is excellent, 
and their power to adorn what they love, 
will be enamoured, in their youth, of women 
neither intelligent nor amiable, nor handsome. 
They make them all three with their fancy ; 
and are sometimes too apt, in after-life, to 
resent what is nobody's fault but their own. 
However, their faults have their excuses, as 
well as those of other men ; only they who 
know most, should excuse most. But the 
reader may take our word for it, from the 
experience of long intercourse with such men, 
that what they value above every other con- 
sideration, in a companion, female or male, is 
amiableness ; that is to say, evenness of tem- 
per, and the willingness (general as well as 
particular) to please and be pleased, without 
egotism and without exaction. This is what 
we have ever felt to be the highest thing in 
themselves, and gave us a preference for them, 
infinite, above others of their own class of 
power. We know of nothing capable of 
standing by the side of it-, or of supplying its 
place, but one ; and that is a deep interest in 
the welfare of mankind. The possession of 
this may sometimes render the very want of 
amiableness touching, because it seems to arise 
from the reverse of what is unamiable and 
selfish, and to be exasperated, not because 
itself is unhappy, but because others are so. It 
was this, far more than his intellectual en- 
dowments (great as they were), which made 
us like Mr. Hazlitt. Many a contest has 
it saved us with him, many a sharp answer, 
and interval of alienation ; and often, perhaps, 



LIFE AFTER DEATH.— BELIEF IN SPIRITS. 



37 



did he attribute to an apprehension of his 
formidable powers (for which, in our animal 
spirits, we did not care twopence) what was 
owing entirely to our love of the sweet drop at 
the bottom of his heart. But only imagine a 
man, who should feel this interest too, and be 
deeply amiable, and have great sufferings, 
bodily and mental, and know his own errors, 
and waive the claims of his own virtues, and 
manifest an unceasing considerateness for the 
comfort of those about him, in the very least 
as well as greatest things, surviving, in the 
pure life of his heart, all mistake, all miscon- 
ception, all exasperation, and ever having a 
soft word in his extremity, not only for those 
who consoled, but for those who distressed 
him ; and imagine how we must have loved 
him! It was Mr. Shelley. His genius, tran- 
scendant as it was, would not have bound us 
to him : his poetry, his tragedy, his philosophy, 
Avould not have bound us ; no, not even his 
generosity, had it been less amiable. It was 
his unbounded heart, and his ever kind speech. 
Now observe, pray, dear reader, that what was 
| most delightful in such a man as this, is most 
delightful, in its degree, in all others ; and 
that people are loved, not in proportion to 
their intellect, but in proportion to their love- 
ability. Intellectual powers are the leaders 
of the world, but only for the purpose of 
guiding them into the promised land of peace 
and amiableness, or of showing them encou- 
raging pictures of it by the way. They are 
no more the things to live with, or repose 
with, apart from qualities of the heart and 
temper, than the means are, without the end ; 
or than a guide to a pleasant spot is the spot 
itself, with its trees, health, and quiet. 

It has been truly said, that knowledge is of 
the head, but wisdom is of the heart ; that is, 
you may know a great many things, but turn 
them to no good account of life and inter- 
course, without a certain harmony of nature 
often possessed by those whose knowledge is 
little or nothing. Many a man is to be found, 
who knows what amiableness is, without being 
amiable ; and many an amiable man, who 
would be put to the blush if you expected 
of him a knowing definition of amiableness. 
But there are a great many people held to 
be very knowing, and entertaining the opinion 
themselves, who, in fact, are only led by that 
opinion to think they may dispense with being 
amiable, and who in so thinking confute their 
pretension to knowingness. The truth is, that 
knowledge is by no means so common a thing as 
people suppose it ; while luckily, on the other 
hand, wisdom is much less uncommon ; for it 
has been held a proof of one of the greatest 
instances of knowledge that ever existed, 
that it knew how little it did know ! whereas 
everybody is wise in proportion as he is happy 
or patient ; that is to say, in proportion as he 
makes the best of good or bad fortune. 



LII.— LIFE AFTER DEATH.— BELIEF IN 
SPIRITS. 

We made use of an inaccurate expression 
in a communication to a correspondent the 
other day, which we take the liberty of thus 
publicly correcting. We spoke of man as a 
* finite " creature. The term, strictly speaking, 
does not convey the meaning we intended. 
Finis is an end, and finite might imply a being 
whose end, or utter termination, was known 
and certain. Assuredly we wrote the word 
in no such spirit of presumption. All our 
writings will testify, that we are of a religion 
which enjoys the most unbounded hopes of 
man, both here and hereafter. By finite, we 
meant to imply a creature of limited powers 
and circumscribed 'present existence. Far were 
we from daring to lift up mortal finger against 
immortal futurity. Religion itself must first 
be put out of man's heart, and the very 
stars out of the sky, and no such words 
be remembered as sentiment and imagination 
and memory, and hope too, ay, and reason, 
before we should presume to say what end 
ought to be put to these endless aspirations of 
the soul. 

We are for making the most of the present 
world, as if there were no hereafter ; and the 
most of hereafter, as if there were no present 
world. We think that God, and Christianity, 
and utility, and imagination, and right reason, 
and whatsoever is complete and harmonious 
in the constitution of the human faculties, 
however opposed it may seem, enjoin us to 
do both. We are surprised, notwithstanding 
the allowance to be made for the great diver- 
sity of Christian sects, how any, Christian, 
calling himself such by the least right of 
discipline, can undervalue the utmost human 
endeavours in behalf of this world, the utmost 
cultivation of this one (among others) of the 
manifest and starry gardens of God ; but we 
are most of all surprised at it in those that 
adhere the most literally to injunction and 
prophecy, while they know how to confine 
the fugitive and conventional uses of the 
terms " this world," &c, &c, to their proper 
meanings. 

In the feasibility of this consummation 
the most infidel Utilitarian is of the same 
faith with the most believing Christian, and so 
far is 

the best good Christian, he, 

Although he knows it not. 

Now he is only to carry his beloved reason 
a little farther, and he will find himself on 
the confines of the most unbounded hopes of 
another world as well as of the present ; for 
reason itself, in its ordinary sense, will tell 
him that it is reasonable to make the utmost 
of all his faculties, imagination included. Mr. 
Bentham, the very incarnation of his reason, 



38 



LIFE AFTER DEATH.— BELIEF IN SPIRITS. 



has told him so *. And if he come to the Pure 
Reason of the Germans, or the discoveries 
which that contemplative nation say they 
have made, in the highest regions of the mind, 
of a reason above ordinary reason, reconciling 
the logic and consciousness of the latter with 
the former's instinctive and hitherto unde- 
veloped affirmations, he is told that he may 
give evidence to faith after his own most 
approved fashion. For our parts, we confess 
that we are of a more child-like turn of con- 
tentment ; and that keeping our ordinary rea- 
son to what appears to us its fittest task, 
namely, the guarding us against the admission 
of gratuitous pains, we will suffer a loving 
faith to open to us whatever regions it pleases, 
of possibilities honourable to God and man, 
cultivating them studiously, whether we tho- 
roughly understand them or not. For who 
thoroughly understands anything which he 
cultivates, even to the flowers at his feet ? 
And cultivating these, shall we refuse to cul- 
tivate also the stars, and aspirations and 
thoughts angelical, and hopes of rejoining 
friends and kindred, and all the flowers 
of heaven ? — No, assuredly, — not while we 
have a star to see, and a thought to reach it. 
Why should heaven have given us those ? 
Why not have put us into some blank region 
of space, with a wall of nothingness on all 
sides of us, and no power to have a thought 
beyond it ? Because, some advocate of chance 
and blind action may say, it could not help 
it ; because the nature of things could not 
help it ; — because things are as they are. 
the assumptions of those who protest against 
assumption ! of the faculty which exclusively 
calls itself reason, and would deprive us of some 
of our most reasonable faculties ! Even upon 
the ground of these gentlemen's showing, faith 
itself cannot be helped ; at least not as long 
as things "are as they are;" and in this 
respect we are assuredly not for helping it. 
We are content to let it love and be happy. 

With regard to the belief in Spirits (which 
we take this opportunity of saying a few words 
upon, as it was in answer to our correspond- 
ent on this subject that we made use of the word 
we have explained) it has surely a right, even 
upon the severest grounds of reason, to rest 
upon the same privileges of possibility, and of a 
modest and wise ignorance to the contrary, as 
any other parts of a loving and even a knowing 
faith ; for the more we know of creation, the 
more we discover of the endless and thronging 
forms of it, — of the crowds in air, earth, and 
water; and are we, with our confessedly limited 
faculties, and our daily discoveries of things 
Avonderful, to assume that there are no modes 
of being but such as are cognizable to our five 
senses ? Had we possessed but two or three 
senses, we know very well that there are thou- 
sands of things round about us of which we 
* Deontology, vol. ii. p. 102. 



could have formed no conception ; and does 
not common modesty, as well as the possibili- 
ties of infinitude, demand of us that we should 
suppose there are senses besides our own, and 
that with the help of but one more we might 
become aware of phenomena at present un- 
manifested to human eyes ? Locke has given 
celebrity to a story of a blind man, who, being 
being asked what he thought of the colour of 
red, said he conceived it must be like the 
sound of a trumpet. A counterpart to this 
story has been found (we know not with what 
truth) in that of a deaf man, who is said to 
have likened the sound of a trumpet to the 
colour of red. Dr. Blacklock, who was blind 
from his infancy, and who wrote very good 
heart and impart verses, in which he talked of 
light and colours with all the confidence of a 
repetition-exercise (a striking lesson to us 
verse-makers !) being requested one day to 
state what he really thought of something 
visible, — of the sun, for instance, — said, with 
modest hesitation, that he conceived it must 
resemble "a pleasing friendship /" We quote 
from memory ; but this was his simile. We 
may thus judge what we miss by the small 
amount of our own complete senses. We may 
have been sometimes tempted to think, seeing 
what a beautiful world this is, and how little 
we make of it, that human beings are not the 
chief inhabitants of the planet, but that there 
are others, of a nobler sort, who see and enjoy 
all its loveliness, and who regard us with the 
same curiosity with which we look upon bees 
or beavers. But a consideration of the divine 
qualities of love and imagination and hope (as 
well as some other reflections, more serious) 
restores us to confidence in ourselves, and we 
resume our task of endeavouring to equalise 
enjoyment with the abundance afibrded us. 
When we look upon the stars at night-time, 
shining and sparkling like so many happy 
eyes, conscious of their joy, we cannot help 
fancying that they are so many heavens which 
have realised, or are in the progress of realis- 
ing, the perfections of which they are capable ; 
and that our own planet (a star in the hea- 
vens to them) is one of the same golden bro- 
therhood of hope and possibility, destined to be 
retained as a heaven, if its inhabitants answer 
to the incitements of the great Experimenter, 
or to be done away with for a new experiment 
if they fail. For endeavour and failure, in the 
particular, are manifestly a part of the uni- 
versal system ; and considering the large scale 
on which Providence acts, and the mixture of 
evil through which good advances, Deluges 
are to be accounted for on principles of the 
most natural reason, moral as well as physical, 
and an awful belief thus becomes reconcileable 
to the commonest deductions of utility. 

But " bad spirits " and spirits to be " afraid 
of?" We confess that, large and willing as 
our faith is in the utmost possibilities of life 



ON DEATH AND BURIAL. 



39 



any sort to believe in those, at least not as 
made up of anything like pure evil or malig- 
nity. It is possible that other beings, as well 
as men, may partake more or less of imperfec- 
tion, and so be liable to mistake and brute 
impulses ; but, as we need not be troubled 
with this side of spiritual possibility, why 
should we ? For as to pure evil or malignity 
for its own sake, apart from some procure- 
ment or notion of good, nothing which we see 
in all nature induces us to suppose it possible. 
The veriest wretch that ever astonished the 
community, did not perpetrate his crime out 
of sheer love of inflicting evil, but out of some 
false idea of good and pleasure, or of avoid- 
ance of evil, which idea might have been done 
away in him by a wiser and healthier training. 
And as to the belief in a great malignant 
principle or Devil (though even he has his 
horrible story lightened by a mixture of mis- 
take and suffering,) the most devout Christians 
have long been giving it up, especially since 
they have observed that the places in which he 
is mentioned in Scripture are very rare, some- 
times apocryphal, and at other times translate- 
able into a very different sense from what was 
commonly received. In truth, the word " devil " 
has not been translated at all ; it has simply been 
repeated, and thus given rise, in many instances, 
to a manifest and painful delusion ; for devil 
(diabolus, Latin ; diawlo, Italian) is merely 
the Greek word Sm/3oAos (diabolos) repeated ; 
and diabolos signified simply an accuser, — a 
calumniator ; it was a Greek word for an evil- 
speaker, a thrower of stones, and came from 
a verb signifying to cast through or against. The 
Latin word is used in the sense to this day, in 
the well-known appellation of the Attorney- 
General, which has caused so many jokes 
against that officer ; for he who was known 
in France by the title of Public Accuser is 
designated in law Latin as the King's or Royal 
Accuser, that is to say, Devil, — " Diabolus 
Regis." The word is flat and plain enough, 
and very edifying. How simply is the fright- 
ful supernatural caution of the Apostle thus 
converted into the most natural of all cau- 
tions ! 

"Be sober, be vigilant (says the Greek- 
English,) for your adversary the Devil walketh 
about, seeking whom he may devour." 

But " Be sober, be vigilant (says the proper 
English-'English,) for your adversary the Ac- 
cuser walketh about seeking whom he may 
devour." 

Here is a poor mistaken human being, in- 
stead of a prowling Satan ; and what can be 
more natural, simple, or reconcileable with 
God's goodness and pre-eminence, and the 
working of an improveable weakness and 
blockish mystery, instead of a malignant 
might? 

To show how accustomed Ave are to follow 



up the spiritual analogies suggested by all kinds 
of reasonable and loving faith, we will close 
this article with a copy of verses which we 
wrote last winter, after we had been thinking 
of some beloved friends who have disappeared 
from this present state of being. 



AN ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 

How sweet it were, if without feeble fright, 

Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight, 

An angel came to us, and we could bear 

To see him issue from the silent air 

At evening in our room, and bend on ours 

His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers 

News of dear friends, and children who have never 

Been dead indeed : as we shall know for ever. 

Alas ! Ave think not what Ave daily see 

About our hearths,— angels, that are to be, 

Or may be if they will, and we prepare 

Their souls and ours to meet in happy air,— 

A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings 

In unison Avith ours, breeding its future Avings. 



LIII.— ON DEATH AND BURIAL. 

The cultivation of pleasant associations is, 
next to health, the great secret of enjoyment ; 
and, accordingly, as we lessen our cares and 
increase our pleasures, we may imagine our- 
selves affording a grateful spectacle to the 
Author of happiness. Error and misery, taken 
in their proportion, are the exceptions in his 
system. The world is most unquestionably 
happier upon the whole than otherwise ; or 
light and air, and the face of nature, would be 
different from what they are, and mankind no 
longer be buoyed up in perpetual hope and 
action. By cultivating agreeable thoughts, 
then, we tend, like bodies in philosophy, to 
the greater mass of sensations, rather than the 
less. 

What we can enjoy, let us enjoy like crea- 
tures made for that very purpose : what we 
cannot, let us, in the same character, do our 
best to deprive of its bitterness. Nothing can 
be more idle than the voluntary gloom with 
which people think to please Heaven in cer- 
tain matters, and which they confound with 
serious acknowledgment, or with what they 
call a due sense of its dispensations. It is 
nothing but the cultivation of the principle of 
fear, instead of confidence, with Avhatever name 
they may disguise it. It is carrying frightened 
faces to court, instead of glad and grateful 
ones ; and is above all measure ridiculous, 
because the real cause of it, and, by the way, of 
a thousand other feelings which religious cour- 
tiers mistake for religion, cannot be concealed 
from the Being it is intended to honour. There 
is a dignity certainly in suffering well, where 
we cannot "choose but suffer ; — if we must take 
physic, let us do it like men ; — but what would 
be his dignity, who, when he had the choice in 
his power, should make the physic bitterer 



40 



ON DEATH AND BURIAL. 



than it is, or even to refuse to render it more 
palatable, purely to look grave over it, and do 
honour to the physician ? 

The idea of our dissolution is one of those 
which we most abuse in this manner, princi- 
pally, no doubt, because it is abhorrent from 
the strong principle of vitality implanted in us, 
and the habits that have grown up with it. 
But what then ? So much the more should 
we divest it of all the unpleasant associations 
which it need not excite, and add to it all the 
pleasant ones which it will allow. 

But what is the course we pursue ? We 
remember having a strong impression, years 
ago, of the absurdity of our mode of treating a 
death-bed, and of the great desirableness of 
having it considered as nothing but a sick one, 
—one to be smoothed and comforted, even by 
cordial helps, if necessary. "We remember 
also how some persons, who, nevertheless, did 
too much justice to the very freest of our spe- 
culations to consider them as profane, w r ere 
startled by this opinion, till we found it ex- 
pressed, in almost so many words, by no less 
an authority than Lord Bacon. We got at 
our notion through a very different process, 
no doubt, — he through the depth of his 
knowledge, and we from the very buoyancy of 
our youth ; — but we are not disposed to think 
it the less wise on that account. "The serious," 
of course, are bound to be shocked at so cheer- 
ing a proposition ; but of them we have already 
spoken. The great objection would be, that 
such a system would deprive the evil-disposed 
of one terror in prospect, and that this princi- 
ple of determent is already found too feeble to 
afford any diminution. The fact is, the whole 
principle is worth little or nothing, unless the 
penalty to be inflicted is pretty certain, and 
appeals also to the less sentimental part of our 
nature. It is good habits,— a well-educated 
conscience, — a little early knowledge, — the 
cultivation of generous motives, — must supply 
people with preventives of bad conduct ; their 
sense of things is too immediate and lively 
to attend, in the long run, to anything else. 
We will be bound to say, generally speaking, 
that the prospective terrors of a death-bed 
never influenced any others than nervous con- 
sciences, too weak, and inhabiting organiza- 
tions too delicate, to afford to be very bad ones. 
But, in the mean time, they may be very alarm- 
ing to such consciences in prospect, and very 
painful to the best and most temperate of 
mankind in actual sufferance ; and why should 
this be, but, as we have said before, to keep 
bitter that which we could sweeten, and to 
persist in a mistaken want of relief, under a 
notion of its being a due sense of our condition? 
We know well enough what a due sense of our 
condition is in other cases of infirmity ; and 
what is a death-bed but the very acme of infir- 
mity,— the sickness, bodily and mental, that of 
all others has most need of relief ? 



If the death happens to be an easy one, 
the case is altered ; and no doubt it is oftener 
so than people imagine ; — but how much pains 
are often taken to render it difficult ! — First, 
the chamber, in which the dying person lies, is 
made as gloomy as possible Avith curtains, and 
vials, and nurses, and terrible whispers, and, 
perhaps, the continual application of handker- 
chiefs to weeping eyes ; — then, whether he 
wishes it or not, or is fit to receive it or not, 
he is to have the whole truth told him by some 
busy-body who never was so anxious, perhaps, 
in the cause of veracity before ; — and lastly, 
come partings, and family assemblings, and 
confusion of the head with matters of faith, 
and trembling prayers, that tend to force upon 
dying weakness the very doubts they under- 
take to dissipate. Well may the soldier take 
advantage of such death-beds as these, to boast 
of the end that awaits him in the field. 

But having lost our friend, we must still 
continue to add to our own misery at the cir- 
cumstance. We must heap about the recollec- 
tion of our loss all the most gloomy and dis- 
tasteful circumstances we can contrive, and 
thus, perhaps, absolutely incline ourselves to 
think as little of him as possible. We wrap 
the body in ghastly habiliments, put it in as 
tasteless a piece of furniture as we can invent, 
dress ourselves in the gloomiest of colours, 
awake the barbarous monotony of the church- 
bell, (to frighten every sick person in the 
neighbourhood,) call about us a set of officious 
mechanics, of all sorts, who are counting their 
shillings, as it were, by the tears that we shed, 
and watching with jealousy every candle's end 
of their " perquisites," — and proceed to consign 
our friend or relation to the dust, under a cere- 
mony that takes particular pains to impress 
that consummation on our minds. — Lastly, 
come tasteless tombstones and ridiculous epi- 
taphs, with perhaps a skull and cross-bones at 
top ; and the tombstones are crowded together, 
generally in the middle of towns, always near 
the places of worship, unless the church-yard 
is overstocked. Scarcely ever is there a tree 
on the spot ; — in some remote villages alone 
are the graves ever decorated with flowers*. 
All is stony, earthy, and dreary. It seems as if, 
after having rendered everything before death 
aspainful as possible, we endeavoured to subside 
into a sullen indifference, which contradicted 
itself by its own efforts. 

The Greeks managed these things better. 
It is curious that we, who boast so much of our 
knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and 
of the glad hopes of an after-life, should take 
such pains to make the image of death melan- 
choly ; while, on the other hand, Gentiles 
whom we treat with so much contempt for 
their ignorance on those heads, should do the 
reverse, and associate it with emblems that 



* Matters have been improving since this article was 
written. 



ON DEATH AND BURIAL. 



41 



ought to belong rather to us. But the truth 
is, that we know very little what we are talk- 
ing about when we speak, in the gross, of the 
ancients, and of their ideas of Deity and hu- 
manity. The very finest and most amiable 
part of our notions on those subjects comes 
originally from their philosophers; all the rest, 
the gloom, the bad passions, the favouritism, 
are the work of other hands, who have bor- 
rowed the better materials as they proceeded, 
and then pretended an original right in them. 
Even the absurd parts of the Greek Mythology 
are less painfully absurd than those of any 
other ; because, generally speaking, they are 
on the cheerful side instead of the gloomy. 
We would rather have a Deity who fell in 
love with the beautiful creatures of his own 
making, than one who would consign nine 
hundred out of a. thousand to destruction for 
not believing ill of him. 

But not to digress from the main subject. 
The ancients did not render the idea of death 
so harshly distinct, as we do, from that of life. 
They did not extinguish all light and cheerful- 
ness in their minds, and in things about them, as 
it were, on the instant ; neither did they keep 
before one's eyes, with hypochondriacal perti- 
nacity, the idea of death's heads and skeletons, 
which, as representations of humanity, are 
something more absurd than the brick which 
the pedant carried about as the specimen of 
his house. They selected pleasant spots for 
sepulture, and outside the town; they adorned 
their graves with arches and pillars, — with myr- 
tles, lilies, and roses; they kept up the social and 
useful idea of their great men by entombing 
them near the highway, so that every traveller 
paid his homage as he went ; and latterly, they 
reduced the dead body to ashes, — a clean and 
inoffensive substance — gathered it into a taste- 
ful urn, and often accompanied it with other 
vessels of exquisite construction, on which 
were painted the most cheerful actions of 
the person departed, even to those of his every- 
day life,— the prize in the games, the toilet, the 
recollections of his marriages and friendships 
— the figures of beautiful females, — every- 
thing, in short, which seemed to keep up the 
idea of a vital principle, and to say, " the crea- 
ture who so did and so enjoyed itself cannot 
be all gone." The image of the vital principle 
and of an after-life was, in fact, often and 
distinctly repeated on these vessels by a variety 
of emblems, animal and vegetable, particularly 
the image of Psyche, or the soul, by means of 
the butterfly, — an association which, in process 
of time, as other associations gathered about 
it, gave rise to the most exquisite allegory in 
the world, the story of Cupid and Psyche. 

Now, we do not mean to say, that every- 
body who thinks as we do upon this subject, 
should or can depart at once from existing 
customs, especially the chief ones. These 
things must either go out gradually or by some 



convulsive movement in society, as others 
•have gone ; and mere eccentricity is no help 
to their departure. "What we cannot undo, ' 
let us only do as decently as possible ; but we 
might render the dying a great deal more com- 
fortable, by just daring a little to consider 
their comforts and not our puerility : we might 
allow their rooms also to be more light and 
cheerful ; we might take pains to bring plea- 
santer associations about them altogether ; and, 
when they were gone, we might cultivate our 
own a little better ; our tombstones might at 
least be in better taste ; we might take more 
care of our graves ; we might preserve our 
sick neighbours from the sound of the death- 
bell ; a single piece of ribbon or crape would 
surely be enough to guard us against the un- 
weeting inquiries of friends, while, in the rest 
of our clothes, we might adopt, by means of a 
ring or a watch-ribbon, some cheerful instead 
of gloomy recollection of the person we had 
lost, — a favourite colour, for instance, or de- 
vice, — and thus contrive to balance a grief 
which we must feel, and which, indeed, in its 
proper associations, it would not be desirable 
to avoid. Rousseau died gazing on the setting 
sun, and was buried under green trees. Pe- 
trarch, who seemed born to complete and ren- 
der glorious the idea of an author from first to 
last, was found dead in his study with his head 
placidly resting on a book. What is there in 
deaths like these to make us look back with 
anguish, or to plunge into all sorts of gloomi- 
ness and bad taste ? 

We know not whether it has ever struck 
any of our readers, but we seem to consider 
the relics of ancient taste, which we possess, 
as things of mere ornament, and forget that 
their uses may be in some measure preserved, 
so as to complete the idea of their beauty, 
and give them, as it were, a soul again. We 
place their urns and vases, for instance, about 
our apartments, but never think of putting 
anything in them ; yet when they are not ab- 
solutely too fragile, we might often do so, — 
fruit, flowers, — toilet utensils, — a hundred 
things, with a fine opportunity (to boot) of 
showing our taste in inscriptions. The Chi- 
nese, in the Citizen of the World, when he was 
shown the two large vases from his own coun- 
try, was naturally amused to hear that they 
only served to fill up the room, and held no 
supply of tea in them as they did at home. A 
lady, a friend of ours, who shows in her coun- 
tenance her origin from a country of taste, and 
who acts up to the promise of her countenance, 
is the only person, but one, whom we ever 
knew to turn antique ornament to account in 
this respect. She buried a favourite bird in a 
vase on her mantel-piece ; and there the little 
rogue lies, with more kind and tasteful asso- 
ciations about him, than the greatest dust in 
Christendom. The other instance is that of 
two urns of marble, which have been turned 



42 



ON WASHERWOMEN. 



as much as possible to the original purposes of 
such vessels, by becoming the depository of 
locks of hair. A lock of hair is an actual 
relic of the dead, as much so, in its propor- 
tion, as ashes, and more lively and recalling 
than even those. It is the part of us that pre- 
serves vitality longest ; it is a clean and ele- 
gant substance : and it is especially connected 
with ideas of tenderness, in the cheek or the 
eyes about which it may have strayed, and the 
handling we may have given it on the living 
head. The thoughts connected with such re- 
lics time gradually releases from grief itself, 
and softens into tender enjoyment ; and 
we know that in the instance alluded to 
the possessor of those two little urns would 
no more consent to miss them from his 
study, than he would any other cheerful asso- 
ciation that he could procure. It is a consider- 
ation, which he would not forego for a great 
deal, that the venerable and lovely dust to 
which they belonged lies in a village church- 
yard, and has left the most unfading part of it 
inclosed in graceful vessels. 

1814. 



LIV.— ON WASHERWOMEN. 

Writers, we think, might oftener indulge 
themselves in direct picture-making, that is to 
say, in detached sketches of men and things, 
which should be to manners, what those of The- 
ophrastus are to character. 

Painters do not always think it necessary to 
paint epics, or to fill a room with a series of 
pictures on one subject. They deal sometimes 
in single figures and groups ; and often exhi- 
bit a profounder feeling in these little concen- 
trations of their art, than in subjects of a more 
numerous description. Their gusto, perhaps, is 
less likely to be lost, on that very account. 
They are no longer Sultans in a seraglio, but 
lovers with a favourite mistress, retired and 
absorbed. A Madonna of Correggio's, the Bath 
of Michael Angelo, the Standard of Leonardo 
da Vinci, Titian's Mistress, and other single 
subjects or groups of the great masters, are 
acknowledged to be among their greatest 
performances, some of them their greatest 
of all. 

It is the same with music. Overtures, which 
are supposed to make allusion to the whole 
progress of the story they precede, are not al- 
ways the best productions of the master ; still 
less are choruses, and quintetts, and other 
pieces involving a multiplicity of actors. The 
overture to Mozart's Magic Flute ( Zauberfiote ) 
is worthy of the title of the piece ; it is truly 
enchanting ; but what are so intense, in their 
way, as the duet of the two lovers, Ah Per- 
dona, — or the laughing trio in Cosi Fan Tutte, — 



or that passionate serenade in Don Giovanni, 
Deh tieni alia finestra, which breathes the very 
soul of refined sensuality ! The gallant is be- 
fore you, with his mandolin and his cap and 
feather, taking place of the nightingale for 
that amorous hour ; and you feel that the 
sounds must inevitably draw his mistress to 
the window. Their intenseness even renders 
them pathetic ; and his heart seems in earnest, 
because his senses are. 

We do not mean to say, that, in proportion 
as the work is large and the subject numerous, 
the merit may not be the greater if all is good. 
Raphael's Sacrament is a greater work than 
his Adam and Eve ; but his Transfiguration 
woidd still have been the finest picture in the 
world, had the second group in the foreground 
been away ; nay, the latter is supposed, and, 
we think, with justice, to injure its effect. We 
only say that there are times when the nu- 
merousness may scatter the individual gusto ; 
■ — that the greatest possible feeling may be 
proved without it ; — and, above all, returning 
to our more immediate subject, that writers, 
like painters, may sometimes have leisure for 
excellent detached pieces, when they want it 
for larger productions. Here, then, is an op- | 
portunity for them. Let them, in their inter- 
vals of history, or, if they want time for it, 
give us portraits of humanity. People lament 
that Sappho did not write more : but, at any 
rate, her two odes are worth twenty epics like 
Tryphiodorus. 

But, in portraits of this kind, writing will 
also have a great advantage ; and may avoid 
what seems to be an inevitable stumbling-block 
in paintings of a similar description. Between 
the matter-of-fact works of the Dutch artists, 
and the subtle compositions of Hogarth, there 
seems to be a medium reserved only for the 
pen. The writer only can tell you all he 
means, — can let you into his whole mind and 
intention. The moral insinuations of the 
painter are, on the one hand, apt to be lost for 
want of distinctness ; or tempted, on the other, 
by their visible nature, to put on too gross a 
shape. If he leaves his meanings to be ima- 
gined, he may unfortunately speak to unima- 
ginative spectators, and generally does ; if he 
wishes to explain himself so as not to be mis- 
taken, he will paint a set of comments upon 
his own incidents and characters, rather than 
let them tell for themselves. Hogarth him- 
self, for instance, who never does anything 
without a sentiment or a moral, is too apt to 
perk them both in your face, and to be over- 
redundant in his combinations. His persons, 
in many instances, seem too much taken away 
from their proper indifference to effect, and to 
be made too much of conscious agents and 
joint contributors. He " o'er-informs his te- 
nements." His very goods and chattels are 
didactic. He makes a capital remark of a 
cow's horn, and brings up a piece of cannon in 



OX WASHERWOMEN. 



43 



aid of a satire on vanity.* It is the writer 
only who, without hurting the most delicate 
propriety of the representation, can leave no 
doubt of all his intentions, — who can insinuate 
his object, in two or three words, to the dullest 
conception ; and, in conversing with the most 
foreign minds, take away all the awkwardness 
of interpretation. What painting gains in 
universality to the eye, it loses by an infinite 
proportion in power of suggestion to the un- 
derstanding. 

There is something of the sort of sketches 
we are recommending in Sterne : but Sterne 
had a general connected object before him, of 
which the parts apparently detached were still 
connecting links : and while he also is apt to 
overdo his subject like Hogarth, is infinitely 
less various and powerful. The greatest mas- 
ter of detached portrait is Steele : but his pic- 
tures too form a sort of link in a chain. Per- 
haps the completest specimen of what we 
mean in the English language is Shenstone's 
School-Mistress, by far his best production, and 
a most natural, quiet, and touching old dame. 
— But what ? Are we leaving out Chaucer 1 
Alas, we thought to be doing something a 
little original, and find it all existing already, 
and in unrivalled perfection, in his portraits of 
the Canterbury Pilgrims ! We can only dilate, 
and vary upon his principle. 

But we are making a very important preface 
to what may turn out a very trifling subject ; 
and must request the reader not to be startled 
at the homely specimen we are about to give 
him, after all this gravity of recommendation. 
Not that we would apologise for homeliness, 
as homeliness. The beauty of this unlimited 
power of suggestion in writing is, that you 
may take up the driest and most common-place 
of all possible subjects, and strike a light out 
of it to warm your intellect and your heart 
by. The fastidious habits of polished life ge- 
nerally incline us to reject, as incapable of in- 
teresting us, whatever does not present itself 
in a graceful shape of its own, and a ready- 
made suit of ornaments. But some of the 
plainest weeds become beautiful under the 
microscope. It is the benevolent provision of 
nature, that in proportion as you feel the ne- 
cessity of extracting interest from common 
things, you are enabled to do so ; — and the 
very least that this familiarity with homeliness 
will do for us is to render our artificial deli- 
cacy less liable to annoyance, and to teach us 
how to grasp the nettles till they obey us. 

The reader sees that we are Wordsworthians 
enough not to confine our tastes to the received 
elegancies of society ; and, in one respect, we 
go farther than Mr. Wordsworth, for, though 
as fond, perhaps, of the country as he, we can 
manage to please ourselves in the very thick 

* See the cannon going off in the turbulent portrait of a 
General-Officer : and the cow's head coming just over that 
of the citizen who is walking with his wife. 



of cities, and even find there as much reason 
to do justice to Providence, as he does in the 
haunts of sportsmen, and anglers, and all-de- 
vouring insects. 

To think, for instance, of that laborious and 
inelegant class of the community — Washer- 
women, and of all the hot, disagreeable, dab- 
bing, smoaking, splashing, kitcheny,cold-dining, 
anti-company-receiving associations, to which 
they give rise. — What can be more annoying 
to any tasteful lady or gentleman, at their first 
waking in the morning, than when that dread- 
ful thump at the door comes, announcing the 
tub-tumbling viragoes, with their brawny arms 
and brawling voices ? We must confess, for 
our own parts, that our taste, in the abstract, 
is not for washerwomen ; we prefer Dryads 
and Naiads, and the figures that resemble 
them ; — 

Fair forms, that glance amid the green of woods, 
Or from the waters give their sidelong shapes 
Half swelling. 

Yet, we have lain awake sometimes in a street 
in town, after this first confounded rap, and 
pleased ourselves with imagining how equally 
the pains and enjoyments of this world are 
dealt out, and what a pleasure there is in the 
mere contemplation of any set of one's fellow- 
creatures and their humours, when our know- 
ledge has acquired humility enough to look at 
them steadily. 

The reader knows the knock which we 
mean. It comes like a lump of lead, and in- 
stantly wakes the maid, whose business it is 
to get up, though she pretends not to hear it. 
Another knock is inevitable, and it comes, j 
and then another ; but still Betty does not 
stir, or stirs only to put herself in a still 
snugger posture, knowing very well that they j 
must knock again. " Now, 'drat that Betty," 
says one of the washerwomen ; " she hears as 
well as we do, but the deuce a bit will she 
move till we give her another ;" and at the 
word another, down goes the knocker again. 
" It's very odd," says the master of the house, 
mumbling from under the bed-clothes, "that 
Betty does not get up to let the people in ; 
I've heard that knocker three times." — " Oh," 
returns the mistress, " she's as lazy as she's 
high," — and off goes the chamber-bell; — by 
which time Molly, who begins to lose her sym- 
pathy with her fellow-servant in impatience of 
what is going on, gives her one or two conclu- 
sive digs in the side ; when the other gets up, 
and rubbing her eyes, and mumbling, and has- 
tening and shrugging herself down stairs, 
opens the door with — " Lard, Mrs. Watson, I 
hope you haven't been standing here long ?" 
— " Standing here long, Mrs. Betty ! Oh don't 
j tell me ; people might stand starving their 
legs off, before you'd put a finger out of bed." 
— " Oh don't say so, Mrs. Watson ; I'm sure I 
always rises at the first knock ; and there — 
you'll find everything comfortable below, 



44 



THE NIGHTMARE. 



with a nice hock of ham, which I made John 
leave for you." At this the washerwomen 
leave their grumbling, and shuffle down stairs, 
hoping to see Mrs. Betty early at breakfast. 
Here, after warming themselves at the copper, 
taking a mutual pinch of snuff, and getting 
things ready for the wash, they take a snack 
at the promised hock ; for people of this pro- 
fession have always their appetite at hand, and 
every interval of labour is invariably cheered 
by the prospect of having something at the end 
of it. " Well," says Mrs. Watson, finishing 
the last cut, a some people thinks themselves 
mighty generous for leaving one what little 
they can't eat ; but, howsomever, it's better 
than nothing." — " Ah," says Mrs. Jones, who 
is a minor genius, " one must take what one 
can get now-a-days ; but Squire Hervey's for 
my money." — "Squire Hervey !" rejoins Mrs. 
Watson, " what's that the great what's-his- 
name as lives yonder ?" — "Ay," returns Mrs. 
Jones, " him as has a niece and nevvy, as they 
say eats him out of house and land ;" — and 
here commences the history of all the last 
week of the whole neighbourhood round, 
which continues amidst the dipping of splash- 
ing fists, the rumbling of suds, and the creak- 
ing of wringings-out, till an hour or two are 
elapsed ; and then for another snack and a 
pinch of snuff, till the resumption of another 
hour's labour or so brings round the time for 
first breakfast. Then, having had nothing to 
signify since five, they sit down at half-past 
six in the wash-house, to take their own meal 
before the servants meet at the general one. 
This is the chief moment of enjoyment. They 
have just laboured enough to make the tea 
and bread and butter welcome, are at an in- 
teresting point of the conversation, (for there 
they contrive to leave off on purpose,) and so 
down they sit, fatigued and happy, with their 
red elbows and white corrugated fingers, to a 
tub turned upside down, and a dish of good 
christian souchong, fit for a body to drink. 

We could dwell a good deal upon this point 
of time, but shall only admonish the fasti- 
dious reader, who thinks he has all the taste 
and means of enjoyment to himself, how he 
looks with scorn upon two persons, who are 
perhaps at this moment the happiest couple of 
human beings in the street, — who have dis- 
charged their duty, have earned their enjoy- 
ment, and have health and spirits to relish it 
to the full. A washerwoman's cup of tea may 
vie with the first drawn cork at a bon-vivant's 
table, and the complacent opening of her 
snuff-box with that of the most triumphant 
politician over a scheme of partition. We 
say nothing of the continuation of their la- 
bours, of the scandal they resume, or the 
complaints they pour forth, when they first 
set off again in the indolence of a satisfied ap- 
petite, at the quantity of work which the mis- 
tress of the house, above all other mistresses, 



is sure to heap upon them. Scandal and com- 
plaint, in these instances, do not hurt the com- 
placency of our reflections ; they are in their 
proper sphere ; and are nothing but a part, as 
it were, of the day's work, and are so much 
vent to the animal spirits. Even the unplea- 
sant day which the work causes up stairs in 
some houses, — the visitors which it excludes, 
and the leg of mutton which it hinders from 
roasting, are only so much enjoyment kept 
back and contrasted, in order to be made 
keener the rest of the week. Beauty itself is 
indebted to it, and draAvs from that steaming 
out-house and splashing tub the well-fitting 
robe that gives out its figure, and the snowy 
cap that contrasts its curls and its complexion. 
In short, whenever we hear a washerwoman 
at her foaming work, or see her plodding to- I 
wards us with her jolly warm face, her mob 
cap, her black stockings, clattering pattens, and i 
tub at arm's, length resting on her hip-joint, I 
we look upon her as a living lesson to us to \ 
make the most both of time and comfort, and I 
as a sort of allegorical compound of pain and j 
pleasure, a little too much, perhaps, in the j 
style of Rubens. 
1814. 



LV.— THE NIGHTMARE. 

We do not hesitate to declare to the reader, 
even in this free-thinking age, that we are no 
small adept in the uses of the Occult Philosophy, 
as I shall thoroughly make manifest. — Be it 
known then, that we are sometimes favoured 
with the visits of a nocturnal spirit, from 
whom we receive the most excellent lessons of 
wisdom. His appearance is not highly pre- 
possessing ; and the weight of his manner of 
teaching, joined to the season he chooses for j 
that purpose, has in it something not a little 
tremendous ; but the end of his instruction is 
the enjoyment of virtue ; and as he is con- 
scious of the alarming nature of his aspect, he 
takes leave of the initiated the moment they 
reduce his lessons to practice. It is true, 
there are a number of foolish persons who, 
instead of being grateful for his friendly 
offices, have affected to disdain them, in the 
hope of tiring him out, and thus getting rid of 
his disagreeable presence ; but they could not 
have taken a worse method ; for his benevo- 
lence is as unwearied as his lessons and ap- 
pearances are formidable, and these unphilo- 
sophic scorners are only punished every night 
of their lives in consequence. If any curious 
person wishes to see him, the ceremony of 
summoning him to appear is very simple, 
though it varies according to the aspirant's im- 
mediate state of blood. With some, nothing 
more is required than the mastication of a few 



THE NIGHTMARE. 



45 



unripe plums or a cucumber, just before mid- 
night : others must take a certain portion 
of that part of a calf, which is used for what 
are vulgarly called veal-cutlets : others, again, 
find the necessary charm in an omelet or 
an olio. For our part, we are so well acquainted 
with the different ceremonies, that, without 
any preparation, we have only to lie in a par- 
ticular posture, and the spirit is sure to make 
its appearance. The figures under which it 
presents itself are various, but it generally 
takes its position upon the breast in a shape 
altogether indescribable, and is accompanied 
with circumstances of alarm and obscurity, not 
a little resembling those which the philosophers 
underwent on their initiation into the Eleu- 
sinian and other mysteries. The first sensa- 
tions you experience are those of a great 
oppression and inability to move ; these you 
endeavour to resist, but after an instant resign 
yourself to their control, or rather flatter your- 
self you will do so, for the sensation becomes 
so painful, that in a moment you struggle into 
another effort, and if in this effort you happen 
to move yourself and cry out, the spirit is sure 
to be gone, for it detests a noise as heartily as 
a monk of La Trappe, a traveller in the Alps, 
or a thief. Could an intemperate person in 
this situation be but philosopher enough to 
give himself up to the spirit's influence for 
a few minutes, he would see his visitant to 
great advantage, and gather as much know- 
ledge at once as would serve him instead of a 
thousand short visits, and make him a good 
liver for months to come. 

It was by this method some time ago, that we 
not only obtained a full view of the spirit, but 
gradually gathering strength from sufferance, 
as those who are initiated into any great 
wisdom must, contrived to enter into conver- 
sation with it. The substance of our dialogue 
we hereby present to the reader ; for it is a mis- 
taken notion of the pretenders to the Cabala, 
that to reveal the secrets on these occasions 
is to do harm, and incur the displeasure of our 
spiritual acquaintances. All the harm is in 
not understanding the secrets properly, and 
explaining them for the benefit of mankind ; 
and on this head we have an objection to 
make to that ancient and industrious order 
of Illuminati the Freemasons, who, though 
they hold with our familiar that eating sup- 
pers is one of the high roads to wisdom, differ 
with him in confining their knowledge to 
such persons as can purchase it. 

We had returned at a late hour from the 
representation of a new comedy, and after 
eating a sleepy and not very great supper, 
reclined ourself on the sofa in a half-sitting 
posture, and taken up a little Horace to see if we 
could keep our eyes open with a writer so full 
of contrast to what we had been hearing. We 
happened to pitch upon that Ode, At Deorum 
quisquis, §c, describing an ancient witches' 



meeting, and fell into an obscure kind of 
reverie upon the identity of popular super- 
stitions in different ages and nations. The 
comic dramatist, however, had been too much 
for us ; the weather, which had been warm, 
but was inclining to grow cloudy, conspired 
with our heaviness, and the only sounds to be 
heard, were the. ticking of a small clock in the 
room, and the fitful sighs of the wind as it 
rose without, 

The moaning herald of a weeping sky. 

By degrees our eyes closed, the hand with the 
book dropped one way, and the head dropped 
back the other upon a corner of the sofa. 

When you are in a state the least adapted to 
bodily perception, it is well known that you 
are in the precise state for spiritual. We had 
not been settled, we suppose, for more than 
a quarter of an hour, when the lid of a veal- 
pie, which we had lately attacked, began swell- 
ing up and down with an extraordinary con- 
vulsion, and we plainly perceived a little figure 
rising from beneath it, which grew larger and 
larger as it ascended, and then advanced with 
great solemnity towards us over the dishes. 
This phenomenon,which we thought we had seen 
often before, but could not distinctly remember 
how or where, was about two feet high, six 
inches of which, at least, went to the compo- 
sition of its head. Between its jaws and 
shoulders there was no separation whatever, 
so that its face, which was very broad and 
pale, came immediately on its bosom, where it 
quivered without ceasing in a very alarming 
manner, being, it seems, of a paralytic sensi- 
bility like blanc-manger. The fearfulness of 
this aspect was increased by two staring and 
intent eyes, a nose turned up, but large, and a 
pair of thick lips turned despondingly down at 
the corners. Its hair, which stuck about its 
ears like the quills of a porcupine, was partly 
concealed by a bolster rolled into a turban, and 
decorated with duck's feathers. The body was 
dressed in a kind of armour, of a substance 
resembling what is called crackling, and girded 
with a belt curiously studded with Spanish 
olives, in the middle of which, instead of 
pistols, were stuck two small bottles contain- 
ing a fiery liquor. On its shoulders were 
wings shaped like the bat's, but much larger ; 
its legs terminated in large feet of lead ; and 
in its hands, which were of the same metal, 
and enormously disproportioned, it bore a 
Turkish bowstring. 

At sight of this formidable apparition, we felt 
an indescribable and oppressive sensation, 
which by no means decreased, as it came 
nearer and nearer, staring and shaking its face 
at us, and making as many ineffable grimaces 
as Munden in a farce. It was in vain, however, 
we attempted to move ; we felt, all the time, 
like a leaden statue, or like Gulliver pinned to 
the ground by the Lilliputians ; and was 



40 



THE NIGHTMARE. 



wondering how our sufferings would terminate, 
when the phantom, by a spring off the table, 
pitched himself with all his weight upon our 
breast, and we thought began fixing his terrible 
bowstring. At this, as I could make no oppo- 
sition, we determined at least to cry out as 
lustily as possible, and were beginning to make 
the effort, when the spirit motioned us to be 
quiet, and, retreating a little from our throat, 
said, in a low suffocating tone of voice, " Wilt 
thou never be philosopher enough to leave off 
sacrificing unto calf s flesh ?" 

" In the nai 
we ejaculated, " what art thou ?" 

"My name," replied the being, a little 
angrily, "which thou wast unwittingly going 
to call out, is Mnpvtglnau-auw-auww, and I 
am Prince of the Night-mares." 

" Ah, my Lord," returned we, " you will par- 
don our want of recollection, but we had never 
seen you in your full dress before, and your 
presence is not very composing to the spirits. 
Doubtless this is the habit in which you 
appeared with the other genii at the levee of 
the mighty Solomon." 

" A fig for the mighty Solomon !" said the 
spirit, good-humouredly ; " this is the cant of 
the Cabalists, who pretend to know so much 
about us. I assure you, Solomon trembled 
much more at me than I did at him. I found 
it necessary, notwithstanding all his wisdom, 
to be continually giving him advice ; and 
many were the quarrels I had on his account 
with Peor, the Daemon of Sensuality, and a 
female devil named Ashtoreth." 

" The world, my Prince," returned we, " do 
not give you credit for so much benevolence." 
"No," quoth the vision, "the world are never 
just to their best advisers. Myfigure,it is true,is 
not the most prepossessing, and my manner of 
teaching is less so ; but I am nevertheless a 
benevolent spirit, and would do good to the 
most ungrateful of your fellow-creatures. This 
very night, between the hours of ten and one, 
I have been giving lessons to no less than 
twelve priests and twenty-one citizens. The 
studious I attend somewhat later, and the 
people of fashion towards morning. — But as 
you seem inclined at last to make a proper use 
of my instructions, I will recount you some of 
my adventures, if you please, that you may 
relate them to your countrymen, and teach 
them to appreciate the trouble I have with 
them." 

" You are really obliging," said we, " and we 
should be all attention, would you do us the 
favour to sit a little more lightly, for each of 
your fingers appears heavier than a porter's 
load ; and, to say the truth, the very sight of 
that bowstring almost throttles us." 



LVL— THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 

At these words the spectre gave a smile, 
which we can compare to nothing but the effect 
of vinegar on a death's-head. However, he 
rose up, though very slowly, and we once more 
breathed with transport, like a person drop- 
ping into his chair after a long journey. He 
then seated himself with much dignity on the 
pillow at the other end of the sofa, and thus 
resumed the discourse : — " I have been among 
mankind, ever since the existence of cooks 
and bad consciences, and my office is two-fold, 
to give advice to the well-disposed, and to in- 
flict punishment on the ill. The spirits over 
which I preside are of that class called by the 
ancients Incubi ; but it was falsely supposed 
that we were fond of your handsome girls, as 
the Rosicrucians maintain, for it is our busi- 
ness to suppress, not encourage the passions, 
as you may guess by my appearance." 

" Pardon us," interrupted we, "but the poets 
and painters represent your Highness as riding 
about on horseback ; some of them even make 
you the horse itself, and it is thus that we 
have been taught to account for the term 
Night-mare." 

Here the phantom gave another smile, which 
made lis feel sympathetically about the mouth 
as though one of our teeth was being drawn. 
" A pretty jest," said he : " as if a spiritual 
being had need of a horse to carry him ! The 
general name of my species in this country is 
of Saxon origin ; the Saxons, uniting as they 
did the two natures of Britons and Germans, 
ate and drank with a vengeance : of course 
they knew me very well, and being continually 
visited by me in all my magnificence, called 
me, by way of eminence, the Night Mara, or 
Spirit of Night. As to the poets and painters, 
I do not know enough of them to be well 
acquainted with their misrepresentations of 
me ; though all of those gentlemen who could 
afford it have been pretty intimate with me. 
The moralizing Epicurean, whom you have in 
your hand there, I knew very well. Very 
good things he wrote, to be sure, about tem- 
perance and lettuces ; but he ate quite as good 
at Mecsenas' table. You may see the delicate 
state of his faculties by the noise he makes 
about a little garlick. There was Congreve, 
too, who dined every day with a duchess, and 
had the gout : I visited him often enough, and 
once wreaked on him a pretty set of tortures 
under the figure of one Jeremy Collier. My 
Lord Rochester, who might have displayed so 
true a fancy of his own without my assistance, 
had scarcely a single idea with which I did not 
supply him, for five years together, during 
which time, you know, he confessed himself to 
have been in a state of intoxication. But I 
am sorry to say, that I have had no small 
trouble with some of your poetical moralists, 



THE NIGHTMARE. 



47 



as well as men of pleasure. Something, I con- 
fess, must be allowed to Pope, whose constitu- 
tion disputed with him every hour's enjoyment; 
| but an invalid so fond of good things might 
I have spared the citizens and clergy a little. 
! It must be owned, also, that the good temper 
j he really possessed did much honour to his 
I philosophy ; but it would have been greater, 
J could he have denied himself that silver 
! saucepan. It seduced him into a hundred 
I miseries. One night, in particular, I remem- 
! ber, after he had made a very sharp attack on 
j Addison and a dish of lampreys, he was terribly 
j used by my spirits, who appeared to him in 
j the shapes of so many flying pamphlets : he 
I awoke in great horror, crying out with a ghastly 
I smile, like a man who pretends to go easily 
j through a laborious wager, e These things are 
j my diversion.' As to your painters, I have 
i known still less of them, though I am ac- 
! quainted with one now living, to whom I once 
| sat at midnight for my portrait, and the like- 
| ness is allowed by all of us to be excellent." 
" Well," interrupted we, " but it is not at all 
like you in your present aspect." 

" No," replied the phantom, " it is my poeti- 
cal look. I have all sorts of looks and shapes, 
civic, political, and poetical. It is by particular 
favour that I appear to you as I really am ; 
but as you have not seen many of my shapes, 
I will, if you please, give you a sample of some 
of my best." 

cc Oh, by no means," said we, somewhat has- 
tily ; " we can imagine quite enough from your 
descriptions. The philosophers certainly ill- 
used you when they represented you as a 
seducer." 

" The false philosophers did," replied the 
spectre ; " the real philosophers knew me 
better. It was at my instance that Pythagoras 
forbade the eating of beans ; Plato owed some 
of his schemes to my hints, though I confess 
not his best ; and I also knew Socrates very 
well from my intimacy with Alcibiades, but 
the familiar that attended him was of a much 
higher order than myself, and rendered my 
services unnecessary. However, my veneration 
for that illustrious man was so great, that on 
the night when he died, I revenged him finely 
on his two principal enemies. People talk of 
the flourishing state of vice, and the happiness 
which guilty people sometimes enjoy in con- 
trast with the virtuous ; but they know nothing 
of what they talk. You should have seen 
Alexander in bed after one of his triumphant 
feasts, or Domitian or Heliogabalus after a 
common supper, and you would have seen who 
was the true monarch, the master of millions, 
or the master of himself. The Prince retired 
perhaps amidst lights, garlands, and perfumes, 
with the pomp of music, and through a host of 
bowing heads : everything he saw and touched 
reminded him of empire ; his bed was of the 
costliest furniture, and he reposed by the side 



of beauty. Reposed, did I say ? As well 
might you stretch a man on a gilded rack, and 
fan him into forgetfulness. No sooner had he 
obtained a little slumber, but myself and other 
spirits revenged the crimes of the day ; in a 
few minutes the convulsive snatches of his 
hands and features announce the rising agita- 
tion ; his face blackens and swells ; his clench- 
ed hands grasp the drapery about him ; he 
tries to turn, but cannot, for a hundred horrors, 
the least of which is of death, crowd on him and 
wither his faculties ; till at last, by an effort of 
despair, he wakes with a fearful outcry, and 
springs from the bed, pale, trembling, and 
aghast, afraid of the very assistance he would 
call, and terrified at the consciousness of him- 
self. Such are the men before whom millions 
of you rational creatures consent to tremble." 

" You talk like an orator," said we ; " but 
surely every ambitious prince has not hor- 
rors like these, for every one is neither so 
luxurious as Alexander, nor so timid and 
profligate as a Domitian or Heliogabalus. 
Conquerors, one would think, are generally too 
full of business to have leisure for consciences 
and night-mares." 

"Why, a great deal may be done," answered 
the spirit, "against horrors of any kind by 
mere dint of industry. But too much business, 
especially of a nature that keeps passion on 
the stretch, will sometimes perform the office 
of indolence and luxury, and turn revengefully 
upon the mind. To this were owing, in great 
measure, the epilepsies of Caesar and Moham- 
med. With the faces of most of the Roman 
Emperors I am as familiar as an antiquary, 
particularly from Tiberius down to Caligula ; 
and again from Constantine downwards. But 
if I punished the degenerate Romans, I never- 
theless punished their enemies too. They 
were not aware, when scourged by Attila, 
what nights their tormentor passed. Luckily 
for justice, he brought from Germany not only 
fire and sword, but a true German appetite. 
I know not a single conqueror of modern 
times who equalled him in horror of dream- 
ing, unless it was a little, spare, aguey, peevish, 
supper-eating fellow, whom you call Frederick 
the Great. Those exquisite ragouts, the en- 
joyment of which added new relish to the sar- 
casms the latter dealt about him with a royalty 
so unanswerable, sufficiently revenged the suf- 
ferers for their submission. Nevertheless, he 
dealt by his dishes as some men do by their 
mistresses : he loved them the more they tor- 
mented him. Poor Trenck, with his bread 
and water in the dungeon of Magdeburg, en- 
joyed a repose fifty times more serene than 
the royal philosopher in his palace of Sans 
Souci, or Without Care. Even on the approach 
of death, this great conqueror — this warrior 
full of courage and sage speculation — could 
not resist the customary pepper and sauce- 
piquante, though he knew he should inevitably 



48 



THE NIGHTMARE. 



see me at night, armed with all his sins, and 
turning his bed into a nest of monsters." 

"Heaven be praised," cried we, " that he had 
a taste so retributive ! The people under ar- 
bitrary governments must needs have a respect 
for the dishes at court. We now perceive, more 
than ever, the little insight we have into the 
uses of things. Formerly one might have 
imagined that eating and drinking had no use 
but the vulgar one of sustaining life ; but it is 
manifest that they save the law a great deal of 
trouble, and the writers of cookery-books can 
be considered in no other light than as ex- 
pounders of a criminal code. Really, we shall 
hereafter approach a dish of turtle with be- 
coming awe, and already begin to look upon a 
ragout as something very equitable and in- 
i flexible." 

"You do justice," observed the spirit, "to 
those eminent dishes, and in the only proper 
way. People who sit down to a feast with 
their joyous darting of eyes and rubbing of 
hands, would have very different sensations, 
did they know what they were about to attack. 
You must know, that the souls of tormented 
animals survive after death, and become in- 
struments of punishment for mankind. Most 
of these are under my jurisdiction, and form 
great part of the monstrous shapes that haunt 
the slumbers of the intemperate. Fish crimped 
alive, lobsters boiled alive, and pigs whipped 
to death, become the most active and formi- 
dable spirits ; and if the object of their ven- 
geance take too many precautions to drown 
his senses when asleep, there is the subtle and 
fell Gout waiting to torment his advanced 
years, — a spirit partaking of the double nature 
of the Night-mare and Salamander, and more 
terrible than any one of us, inasmuch as he 
makes his attacks by day as well as by night." 

"We shudder to think," interrupted we, 
"even of the monstrous combinations which 
have disturbed our own rest, and formed so hor- 
rible a contrast to the gaiety of a social supper." 

"Oh, as for that matter,'' said the phan- 
tom, in a careless tone, "you know nothing 
of the horrors of a glutton, or a nefa- 
rious debauchee. Suffocation with bolsters, 
heaping of rocks upon the chest, buryings 
alive, and stragglings to breathe without a 
mouth, are among their common-place suffer- 
ings. The dying glutton in La Fontaine ne- 
ver was so reasonable, as when he desired to 
have the remainder of his fish. He was afraid 
that if he did not immediately go off, he might 
have a nap before he died, which would have 
been. a thousand times worse than death. Had 
Apicius, Ciacco the Florentine, Dartineuf, or 
Vitellius, been able and inclined to paint what 
they had seen, Callot would have been a mere 
Cipriani to them. I could produce you a jolly 
fellow, a corpulent nobleman, from the next 
hotel, the very counterpart of the glutton in 
Rubens's Fall of the Damned, who could bring I 



together a more hideous combination of fan- 
cies than are to be found in Milton's Hell. He 
is not without information, and a disposition 
naturally good ; but a long series of bad habits 
have made him what they call a man of plea- 
sure, — that is to say, he takes all sorts of pains 
to get a little enjoyment which shall produce 
him a world of misery. One of his passions, 
which he mil not resist, is for a particular dish, 
pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which 
sends him almost every night into Tartarus. 
At this minute, the spectres of the supper- 
table are busy with him, and Dante himself 
could not have worked up a greater horror for 
the punishment of vice than the one he is un- 
dergoing. He fancies that though he is himself, 
he is nevertheless four different beings at once, 
of the most odious and contradictory natures, 
— that his own indescribable feelings are fight- 
ing bodily and maliciously with each other, — 
and that there is no chance left him, either for 
escape, forgetfulness, or cessation." 

" Gracious powers !" cried we ; "what, all 
this punishment for a dish ?" 

"You do not recollect," answered the spirit, 
" what an abuse such excesses are of the di- 
vine gift of reason, and how they distort the 
best tendencies of human nature. The whole 
end of existence is perverted by not taking 
proper care of the body. This man will rise 
to-morrow morning, pallid, nervous, and sul- 
len ; his feelings must be reinforced with a 
dram to bear the ensuing afternoon ; and I 
foresee, that the ill-temper arising from his de- 
bauch will lead him into a very serious piece 
of injustice against his neighbour. To the 
same cause may be traced fifty of the common 
disquietudes of life, its caprices and irritabi- 
lities. To-night a poor fellow is fretful be- 
cause his supper was not rich enough, but to- 
morrow night he will be in torture because it 
was too rich. A hysterical lady shall flat- 
ter herself she is sentimentally miserable, 
when most likely her fine feelings are to be 
deduced, not from sentiment, but a surfeit. 
Your Edinburgh wits thought they had laid 
down a very droll impossibility, when they 
talked of cutting a man's throat with a pound 
of pickled salmon ; whereas much less dishes 
have performed as wonderful exploits. I have 
known a hard egg to fill a household with dis- 
may for days together ; a cucumber has disin- 
herited an only son ; and a whole province has 
incurred the royal anger of its master at the 
instigation of a set of woodcocks." 

"It is a thousand pities," said we, "that his- 
tory, instead of habituating us to love 'the 
pomp and circumstance' of bad passions, can- 
not trace the actions of men to their real 
sources." 

" Well, well," said the spirit, "now that you 
are getting grave on the subject, I think I may 
bid you adieu. Your nation has produced ex- 
cellent philosophers, who were not the less 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



49 



wise for knowing little of me. Pray tell your 
countrymen that they are neither philosophic 
nor politic in feasting as they do on all occa- 
sions, joyful, sorrowful, or indifferent : that 
good sense, good temper, and the good of their 
country, are distinct things from indigestion ; 
and that, when they think to show their patriotic 
devotion by carving and gormandizing, they 
are no wiser than the bacchanals of old, who 
took serpents between their teeth, and tor- 
tured themselves with knives." 

So saying the spectre rose, and stretching 
out his right hand, with a look which we believe 
he intended to be friendly, advanced towards 
us ; he then took our hand in his own, and 
perceiving signs of alarm in our countenance, 
burst into a fit of laughter, which was the very 
quintessence of discord, and baffles all descrip- 
tion, being a compound of the gabblings of 
geese, grunting of hogs, quacking of ducks, 
squabbling of turkeys, and winding up of 
smoke-jacks. When the fit was pretty well 
over, he gave us a squeeze of the hand, which 
made us jump up with a spring of the knees, 
and gradually enveloping himself in a kind of 
steam, vanished with a noise like the crash of 
crockery ware. We looked about us ; we found 
that our right hand, which held the Horace, 
had got bent under us, and gone to sleep, and 
that, in our sudden start, we had kicked half 
the dishes from the supper-table. 
1811. 



LVIL— THE FLORENTINE LOVERS*. 

At the time when Florence was divided 
into the two fierce parties of Guelfs and Ghi- 
belines, there was great hostility between two 
families of the name of Bardi and Buondel- 
monti. It was seldom that love took place 
between individuals of houses so divided ; but, 
when it did, it was proportionately vehement, 
either because the individuals themselves were 
vehement in all their passions, or because love, 
falling upon two gentle hearts, made them the 
more pity and love one another, to find them- 
selves in so unnatural a situation. 

Of this latter kind was an affection that took 
place between a young lady of the family of 
the Bardi, called Dianora d' Amerigo, and a 
youth of the other family, whose name was 
Ippolito. The girl was about fifteen, and in 
I the full flower of her beauty and sweetness. 
Ippolito was about three years older, and 
looked two or three more, on account of a 
certain gravity and deep regard in the upper 
part of his face. You might know by his lips 
that he could love well, and by his eyes that 
he could keep the secret. There was a like- 

* The groundwork of this story is in a late Italian pub- 
lication called the Florentine Observer, descriptive of the 
old buildings and other circumstances of local interest in 
the capital of Tuscany. 



ness, as sometimes happens, between the two 
lovers ; and perhaps this was no mean help to 
their passion ; for as we find painters often 
giving their own faces to their heroes, so the 
more excusable vanity of lovers delights to 
find that resemblance in one another, which 
Plato said was only the divorced half of the 
original human being rushing into communion 
with the other. 

Be this as it may (and lovers in those times 
were not ignorant of such speculations), it 
needed but one sight of Dianora d' Amerigo 
to make Ippolito fall violently in love with 
her. It was in church on a great holiday. In 
the South the church has ever been the place 
where people fall in love. It is there that the 
young of both sexes oftenest find themselves 
in each other's company. There the volup- 
tuous that cannot fix their thoughts upon 
heaven, find congenial objects, more earthly, to 
win their attention ; and there, the most inno- 
cent and devotional spirits, voluptuous also 
without being aware of it, and not knowing 
how to vent the grateful pleasure of their 
hearts, discover their tendency to repose on 
beings that can show themselves visibly 
sensible to their joy. The paintings, the per- 
fumes, the music, the kind crucifix, the mix- 
ture of aspiration and earthly ceremony, the 
draperies, the white vestments of young and 
old, the boys' voices, the giant candles, typical 
of the seraphic ministrants about God's altar, 
the meeting of all ages and classes, the echo- 
ings of the aisles, the lights and shades of the 
pillars and vaulted roofs, the very struggle of 
daylight at the lofty windows, as if earth 
were at once present and not present, — all 
have a tendency to confuse the boundaries of 
this world and the next, and to set the heart 
floating in that delicious mixture of elevation 
and humility, which is ready to sympathize 
with whatever can preserve to it something 
like its sensations, and save it from the hard- 
ness and definite folly of ordinary life. It was 
in a church that Boccaccio, not merely the 
voluptuous Boccaccio, who is but half-known 
by the half-witted, but Boccaccio, the future 
painter of the Falcon and the Pot of Basil, 
first saw the beautiful face of his Fiammetta. 
In a church, Petrarch felt the sweet shadow 
fall on him that darkened his life for twenty 
years after. And the fond gratitude of the 
local historian for a tale of true love, has left 
it on record, that it was in the church of St. 
Giovanni at Florence, and on the great day of 
Pardon, which falls on the 13th of January, 
that Ippolito de' Buondelmonte became ena- 
moured of Dianora d' Amerigo. [How deli- 
cious it is to repeat these beautiful Italian 
names, when they are not merely names ! We 
find ourselves almost unconsciously writing 
them in a better hand than the rest ; not 
merely for the sake of the printer, but for the 
pleasure of lingering upon the sound.] 



50 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



When the people were about to leave church, 
Ippolito, in turning to speak to an acquaint- 
ance, lost sight of his unknown beauty. He 
made haste to plant himself at the door, telling 
his companion that he should like to see the 
ladies come out ; for he had not the courage 
to say which lady. When he saw Dianora 
appear, he changed colour, and saw nothing 
else. Yet though he beheld, and beheld her 
distinctly, so as to carry away every feature in 
his heart, it seemed to him afterwards that he 
had seen her only as in a dream. She glided 
by him like a thing of heaven, drawing her 
veil over her head. As he had not the courage 
to speak of her, he had still less the courage to 
ask her name ; but he was saved the trouble. 
" God and St. John bless her beautiful face ! " 
cried a beggar at the door ; " she always gives 
double of any one else." — " Curse her ! " mut- 
tered Ippolito's acquaintance ; " she is one of 
the Bardi." The ear of the lover heard both 
these exclamations, and they made an indelible 
impression. Being a lover of books and poetry, 
and intimate with the most liberal of the two 
parties, such as Dante Alighieri (afterwards so 
famous) and Guido Cavalcanti, Ippolito, though 
a warm partisan himself, and implicated in a 
fierce encounter that had lately taken place 
between some persons on horseback, had been 
saved from the worst feelings attendant on 
political hostility ; and they now appeared to 
him odious. He had no thought, it is true, of 
forgiving one of the old Bardi, who had cut 
his father down from his horse ; but he would 
now have sentenced the whole party to a 
milder banishment than before ; and to curse 
a female belonging to it, and that female 
Dianora ! — he differed with the stupid fellow 
that had done it whenever they met after- 
wards. 

It was a heavy reflection to Ippolito to think 
that he could not see his mistress in her own 
house. She had a father and mother living as 
well as himself, and was surrounded with re- 
lations. It was a heavier still that he knew 
not how to make her sensible of his passion ; 
and the heaviest of all, that being so lovely, 
she would certainly be carried off by another 
husband. What was he to do ? He had no 
excuse for writing to her ; and as to serenad- 
ing her under her window, unless he meant to 
call all the neighbours to witness his temerity, 
and lose his life at once in that brawling age, 
it was not to be thought of. He was obliged 
to content himself with watching, as well as 
he could, the windows of her abode, following 
her about whenever he saw her leave it, and 
with pardonable vanity trying to catch her 
attention by some little action that should give 
her a good thought of the stranger ; such as 
anticipating her in giving alms to a beggar. 
We must even record, that on one occasion he 
contrived to stumble against a dog and tread 
on his toes, in order that he might ostenta. 



tiously help the poor beast out of the way. 
But his day of delight was church-day. Not a 
fast, not a feast did he miss ; not a Sunday, 
nor a saints'-day. " The devotion of that 
young gentleman," said an old widow-lady, 
her aunt, who was in the habit of accompany- 
ing Dianora, " is indeed edifying ; and yet he 
is a mighty pretty youth, and might waste his 
time in sins and vanities with the gayest of 
them." And the old widow -lady sighed, 
doubtless out of a tender pity for the gay. 
Her recommendation of Ippolito to her niece's 
notice would have been little applauded by 
her family ; but, to say the truth, she was not 
responsible. His manoeuvres and constant 
presence had already gained Dianora's atten- 
tion ; and, with all the unaffected instinct of 
an Italian, she was not long in suspecting who 
it was that attracted his devotions, and in 
wishing very heartily that they might con- 
tinue. She longed to learn who he was, but 
felt the same want of courage as he himself 
had experienced. " Did you observe," said the 
aunt, one day after leaving church, " how the 
poor boy blushed, because he did but catch 
my eye ? Truly, such modesty is very rare." 
" Dear aunt," replied Dianora, with a mixture 
of real and affected archness, of pleasure and 
of gratitude, " I thought you never wished 
me to notice the faces of young men." " Not 
of young men, niece," returned the aunt, 
gravely ; " not of persons of twenty-eight, or 
thirty, or so, nor indeed of youths in general, 
however young ; but then this youth is very 
different ; and the most innocent of us may 
look, once in a way or so, at so very modest 
and respectful a young gentleman. I say re- 
spectful, because when I gave him a slight 
curtsey of acknowledgment, or so, for making 
way for me in the aisle, he bowed to me with 
so solemn and thankful an air, as if the favour 
had come from me ; which was extremely 
polite ; and if he is very handsome, poor boy, 
how can he help that ? Saints have been 
handsome in their days, ay and young, or 
their pictures are not at all like, which is im- 
possible ; and I am sure St. Dominic himself, 
in the wax-work, God forgive me ! hardly 
looks sweeter and humbler at the Madonna 
and Child, than he did at me and you, as we 
went by." " Dear aunt," rejoined Dianora, " I 
did not mean to reproach you, I'm sure ; but, 
sweet aunt, we do not know him, you know ; 
and you know — " " Know !" cried the old 
lady ; " I'm sure I know him as well as if he 
were my own aunt's son ; which might not be 
impossible, though she is a little younger than 
myself ; and if he were my own, I should not 
be ashamed." "And who then," inquired 
Dianora, scarcely articulating her words, "who 
then is he ? " " Who ? " said the aunt, " why 
the most edifying young gentleman in all 
Florence, that's who he is ; and it does not 
signify what he is else, manifestly being a 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



51 



gentleman as he is, and one of the noblest, I 
warrant ; and I wish you may have no worse 
husband ; child, when you come to marry, 
though there is time enough to think of that. 
Young ladies, now-a-days, are always for 
knowing who everybody is, who he is, and 
what he is, and whether he is this person or 
that person, and is of the Grand Prior's side, 
or the Archbishop's side, and what not ; and 
all this before they will allow him to be even 
handsome ; which, I am sure, was not so in my 
youngest days. It is all right and proper, if 
matrimony is concerned, or they are in danger 
of marrying below their condition, or a pro- 
fane person, or one that's hideous, or a heretic ; 
but to admire an evident young saint, and one 
that never misses church, Sunday or saint's- 
day, or any day for aught that I see, is a thing 
that, if anything, shows we may hope for the 
company of young saints hereafter ; and if so 
very edifying ayoung gentleman is also respect- 
ful to the ladies, was not the blessed St. Francis 
himself of his opinion in that matter ? And 
did not the seraphical St. Teresa admire him 
the more for it ? And does not St. Paul, in 
his very epistles, send his best respects to the 
ladies Tryphoena and Tryphosa ? And was 
there ever woman in the New Testament (with 
reverence be it spoken, if we may say women 
of such blessed females) was there ever woman, 
I say, in the New Testament, not even except- 
ing Madonna Magdalen who had been posses- 
sed with seven devils (which is not so many 
by half as some ladies I could mention), nor 
Madonna, the other poor lady, whom the un- 
forgiving hypocrites wanted to stone" (and 
here the good old lady wept, out of a mixture 
of devotion and gratitude), " was there one of 
all these women, or any other, whom our 
Blessed Lord himself" (and here the tears 
came into the gentle eyes of Dianora) "did 
not treat with all that sweetness, and kindness, 
and tenderness, and brotherly love, which, like 
all his other actions, and as the seraphical 
Father Antonio said the other day in the pul- 
pit, proved him to be not only from heaven, 
but the truest of all nobles on earth, and a 
natural gentleman born ?" 

We know not how many more reasons the 
good old lady would have given, why all the 
feelings of poor Dianora's heart, not excepting 
her very religion, which was truly one of them, 
should induce her to encourage her affection 
for Ippolito. By the end of this sentence they 
had arrived at their home, and the poor youth 
returned to his. We say "poor" of both the 
lovers, for by this time they had both become 
sufficiently enamoured to render their cheeks 
the paler for discovering their respective 
families, which Dianora had now done as well 
as Ippolito. 

A circumstance on the Sunday following had 
nearly discovered them, not only to one an- 
other, but to all the world. Dianora had 



latterly never dared to steal a look at Ippolito, 
for fear of seeing his eyes upon her ; and 
Ippolito, who was less certain of her regard 
for him than herself, imagined that he had 
somehow 5 offended her. A few Sundays before, 
she had sent him home bounding for joy. 
There had been two places empty where he 
was kneeling, one near him, and the other a 
little farther off. The aunt and the niece, 
who came in after him, and found themselves 
at the spot where he was, were perplexed 
which of the two places to choose ; when it 
seemed to Ippolito that by a little movement 
of her arm Dianora decided for the one near- 
est him. He had also another delight. The 
old lady, in the course of the service, turned 
to her niece, and asked her why she did not 
sing as usual. Dianora bowed her head, and 
in a minute or two afterwards Ippolito heard 
the sweetest voice in the world, low indeed, 
almost to a whisper, but audible to him. He 
thought it trembled ; and he trembled also. 
It seemed to thrill within his spirit, in the 
same manner that the organ thrills through 
the body. No such symptom of preference 
occurred afterwards. The ladies did not come 
so near him, whatever pains he took to occupy 
so much room before they came in, and then 
make room when they appeared. However, 
he was self-satisfied as well as ingenious 
enough in his reasonings on the subject, not to 
lay much stress upon this behaviour, till it 
lasted week after week, and till he never again 
found Dianora looking even towards the quar- 
ter in which he sat : for it is our duty to 
confess, that if the lovers were two of the de- 
voutest of the congregation, which is certain, 
they were apt also, at intervals, to be the least 
attentive ; and, furthermore, that they would 
each pretend to look towards places at a little 
distance from the desired object, in order that 
they might take in, with the sidelong power of 
the eye, the presence and look of one another. 
But for some time Dianora had ceased even to 
do this ; and though Ippolito gazed on her the 
more steadfastly, and saw that she was paler 
than before, he began to persuade himself that 
it was not on his account. At length, a sort 
of desperation urged him to get nearer to her, 
if she would not condescend to come near 
himself ; and, on the Sunday in question, 
scarcely knowing what he did, or how he saw, 
felt, or breathed, he knelt right down beside 
her. There was a pillar next him, which 
luckily kept him somewhat in the shade ; and, 
for a moment, he leaned his forehead against 
the cold marble, which revived him. Dianora 
did not know he was by her. She did not 
sing : nor did the aunt ask her. She kept one 
unaltered posture, looking upon her mass-book, 
and he thought she did this on purpose. 
Ippolito, who had become weak with his late 
struggles of mind, felt almost suffocated with 
his sensations. He was kneeling side by side 



52 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



with her ; her idea, her presence, her very 
drapery, which was all that he dared to feel 
himself in contact with, the consciousness of 
kneeling with her in the presence of Him whom 
tender hearts implore for pity on their infirm- 
ities, all rendered him intensely sensible of 
his situation. By a strong effort, he endea- 
voured to turn his self-pity into a feeling en- 
tirely religious ; but when he put his hands 
together, he felt the tears ready to gush away 
so irrepressibly, that he did not dare it. At 
last the aunt, who had in fact looked about for 
him, recognized him with some surprise, and 
more pleasure. She had begun to suspect his 
secret ; and though she knew who he was, and 
that the two families Avere at variance, yet a 
great deal of good nature, a sympathy with 
pleasures of which no woman had tasted more, 
and some considerable disputes she had lately 
with another old lady, her kinswoman, on the 
subject of politics, determined her upon at 
least giving the two lovers that sort of en- 
couragement, which arises not so much from 
any decided object we have in view, as from a 
certain vague sense of benevolence, mixed 
with a lurking wish to have our own way. 
Accordingly, the well-meaning old widow-lady, 
without much consideration, and loud enough 
for Ippolito to hear, whispered her niece to 
let the gentleman next her read in her book, 
as he seemed to have forgotten to bring his 
own. Dianora, without lifting her eyes, and 
never suspecting who it was, moved her book 
sideways, with a courteous inclination of the 
head, for the gentleman to take it. He did so. 
He held it with her. He could not hinder his 
hand from shaking ; but Dianora's reflections 
were so occupied upon one Avhom she little 
thought so near her, that she did not perceive 
it. At length the book tottered so in his hand, 
that she could not but notice it. She turned 
to see if the gentleman was ill ; and instantly 
looked back again. She felt that she herself 
was too weak to look at him, and whispering 
to her aunt, " I am very unwell," the ladies 
rose and made their way out of the church. 
As soon as she felt the fresh air she fainted, 
and was carried home ; and it happened, at 
the same moment, that Ippolito, unable to keep 
his feelings to himself, leaned upon the marble 
pillar at which he was kneeling, and groaned 
aloud. He fancied she had left him in disdain. 
Luckily for him, a circumstance of this kind 
was not unknown in a place where penitents 
would sometimes be overpowered by a sense 
of their crimes ; and though Ippolito was recog- 
nised by some, they concluded he had not been 
the innocent person they supposed. They 
made up their minds in future that his retired 
and bookish habits, and his late evident suffer- 
ing, were alike the result of some dark offence ; 
and among these persons, the acquaintance 
who had cursed Dianora when he first beheld 
her, was glad to be one ; for without knowing 



his passion for her, much less her return of it, 
which was more than the poor youth knew 
himself, he envied him for his accomplishments 
and popularity. 

Ippolito dragged himself home, and after en- 
deavouring to move about for a day or two, 
and to get as far as Dianora's abode, — an at- 
tempt he gave up for fear of being unable to 
come away again, — was fairly obliged to take 
to his bed. What a mixture of delight, with 
sorrow, would he have felt, had he known that 
his mistress was almost in as bad a state ! The 
poor aunt, who soon discovered her niece's 
secret, now found herself in a dreadful dilem- 
ma ; and the worst of it was, that being on the 
female side of the love, and told by Dianora 
that it would be the death of her if she dis- 
closed it to " him" or anybody connected with 
him, or, indeed, anybody at all, she did not 
know what steps to take. However, as she 
believed that at least death might possibly 
ensue if the dear young people were not as- 
sured of each other's love, and certainly did 
not believe in any such mortality as her niece 
spoke of, she was about to make her first 
election out of two or three measures which 
she was resolved upon taking, when, luckily 
for the salvation of Dianora's feelings, she was 
surprised by a visit from the person whom of 
all persons in the world she wished to see — 
Ippolito's mother. 

The two ladies soon came to a mutual un- 
derstanding, and separated with comfort for 
their respective patients. We need not wait 
to describe how a mother came to the know- 
ledge of her son's wishes ; nor will it be ne- 
cessary to relate how delighted the two lovers 
were to hear of one another, and to be assured 
of each other's love. But Ippolito's illness 
now put on a new aspect ; for the certainty of 
his being welcome to Dianora, and the easiness 
with which he saw his mother give way to his 
inclinations, made him impatient for an inter- 
view. Dianora was afraid of encountering him 
as usual in public ; and he never ceased urging 
his mother, till she consented to advise with 
Dianora's aunt upon what was to be done. 
Indeed, with the usual weakness of those who 
take any steps, however likely to produce 
future trouble, rather than continue a present 
uneasiness, she herself thought it high time to 
do something for the poor boy ; for the house 
began to remark on his strange conduct. All 
his actions were either too quick, or too slow. 
At one time he would start up to perform the 
most trivial office of politeness, as if he were 
going to stop a conflagration ; at another, the 
whole world might move before him without 
his noticing. He would now leap on his horse, 
as if the enemy were at the city-gates ; and 
next day, when going to mount it, stop on a 
sudden, with the reins in his hands, and fall 
a musing. "What is the matter with the 
boy ?" said his father, who was impatient at 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



5'j 



: seeing him so little Lis own master ; " has he 
j stolen a box of jewels ?" for somebody had 
| spread a report that he gambled, and it was 
I observed that he never had any money in his 
! pocket. The truth is, he gave it all away to 
J the objects of Dianora's bounty, particularly 
to the man who blessed her at the church 
I door. One day his father, who loved a bitter 
' joke, made a young lady, who sat next him at 
dinner, lay her hand before him instead of the 
plate ; and upon being asked why he did not 
eat, he was very near taking a piece of it for a 
mouthful. " Oh, the gallant youth ! " cried 
the father, and Ippolito blushed up to the 
eyes ; which was taken as a proof that the 
irony was well-founded. But Ippolito thought 
of Dianora's hand, how it held the book with 
S him when he knelt by her side ; and, after a 
I little pause, he turned and took up that of the 
I young lady, and begged her pardon with the 
best grace in the world. " He has the air of a 
prince," thought his father, " if he would but 
behave himself like other young men." The 
young lady thought he had the air of a lover ; 
and as soon as the meal was over, his mother 
put on her veil, and went to seek a distant re- 
lation called Gossip Veronica. 

Gossip Veronica was in a singular position 
with regard to the two families of Bardi and 
Buondelmonti. She happened to be related 
at nearly equal distances to them both ; and 
she hardly knew whether to be prouder of the 
double relationship, or more annoyed with the 
evil countenances they showed her, if she did 
not pay great attention to one of them, and no 
attention to the other. The pride remained 
uppermost, as it is apt to do ; and she hazarded 
all consequences for the pleasure of inviting 
now some of the young Bardi, and now 
some of the young Buondelmonti ; hinting 
to them when they went away, that it would 
be as well for them not to say that they had 
heard anything of the other family's visit- 
ing her. The young people were not sorry 
to keep the matter as secret as possible, be- 
cause their visits to Gossip Veronica were 
always restrained for a long time, if anything 
of the sort transpired ; and thus a spirit of 
concealment and intrigue was sown in their 
young minds, which might have turned out 
worse for Ippolito and Dianora, if their hearts 
had not been so good. 

But here was a situation for Gossip Veroni- 
ca ! Dianora's aunt had been with her some 
days, hinting that something extraordinary, 
but as she hoped not unpleasant, would be 
proposed to the good Gossip, which for her 
part had her grave sanction ; and now came 
the very mother of the young Buondelmonte 
to explain to her what this intimation was, 
and to give her an opportunity of having one 
of each family in her house at the same time ! 
There was a great falling off in the beatitude, 
when she understood that Ippolito's presence 



was to be kept a secret from all her visitors 
that day, except Dianora ; but she was recon- 
ciled on receiving an intimation that in future 
the two ladies would have no objection to her 
inviting whom she pleased to her house, and 
upon receiving a jewel from each of them as a 
pledge of their esteem. As to keeping the 
main secret, it was necessary for all parties. 

Gossip Veronica, for a person in her rank 
of Life, was rich, and had a pleasant villa at 
Monticelli, about half a mile from the city. 
Thither, on a holiday in September, which 
was kept with great hilarity by the peasants, 
came Dianora d' Amerigo de' Bardi, attended 
by her aunt Madonna Lucrezia, to see, as her 
mother observed, that no "improper persons" 
were there ; — and thither, before daylight, let 
in by Gossip Veronica herself, at the hazard 
of her reputation and of the furious jealousy 
of a young vine-dresser in the neighbourhood, 
who loved her good things better than any- 
thing in the world except her waiting-maid, 
came the young Ippolito Buondelmonte de' 
Buondelmonti, looking, as she said, like the 
morning-star. 

The morning-star hugged, and was hugged 
with great good-will by the kind Gossip, and 
then twinkled with impatience from a corner 
of her chamber-window till he saw Dianora. 
How his heart beat when he beheld her com- 
ing up through the avenue ! Veronica met 
her near the garden-gate, and pointed towards 
the window, as they walked along. Ippolito 
fancied she spoke of him, but did not know 
what to think of it, for Dianora did not change 
countenance, nor do anything but smile good- 
naturedly on her companion, and ask her 
apparently some common question. The 
truth was, she had no suspicion he was there ; 
though the Gossip, with much smirking and 
mystery, said she had a little present there for 
her, and such as her lady-mother approved. 
Dianora, whom, with all imaginable respect 
for her, the Gossip had hitherto treated, from 
long habit, like a child, thought it was some 
trifle or other, and forgot it next moment. 
Every step which Ippolito heard on the stair- 
case he fancied was hers, till it passed the 
door, and never did morning appear to him at 
once so delicious and so tiresome. To be in the 
same house with her, what joy ! But to be in 
the same house with her, and not to be able to 
tell her his love directly, and ask her for hers, 
and fold her into his very soul, what impatience 
and misery ! Two or three times there was a 
knock of some one to be let in ; but it was 
only the Gossip, come to inform him that he 
must be patient, and that she did not know when 
Madonna Lucrezia would please to bring Dia- 
nora, but most likely after dinner, when the 
visitors retired to sleep a little. Of all im- 
pertinent things, dinner appeared to him the 
most tiresome and unfit. He wondered how 
any thinking beings, who might take a cake or 



54 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



a cup of wine by the way, and then proceed to 
love one another, could sit round a great 
wooden table, patiently eating of this and that 
nicety ; and, above all, how they could sit still 
afterwards for a moment, and not do anything 
else in preference, — stand on their heads, or 
toss the dishes out of window. Then the 
Festival ! God only knew how happy the 
peasantry might choose to be, and how long 
they might detain Dianora with their compli- 
ments, dances, and songs. Doubtless, there 
must be many lovers among them ; and how 
they could bear to go jigging about in this 
gregarious manner, when they must all wish 
to be walking two by two in the green lanes, 
was to him inexplicable. However, Ippolito 
was very sincere in his gratitude to Gossip 
Veronica, and even did his best to behave 
handsomely to her cake and wine ; and after 
dinner his virtue was rewarded. 

It is unnecessary to tell the reader, that he 
must not judge of other times and countries 
by his own. The real fault of those times, as 
of most others, lay, not in people's loves, but 
their hostilities ; and if both were managed in 
a way somewhat different from our own, per- 
haps neither the loves were less innocent, nor 
the hostilities more ridiculous. After dinner, 
when the other visitors had separated here 
and there to sleep, Dianora, accompanied by 
her aunt and Veronica, found herself, to her 
great astonishment, in the same room with 
Ippolito ; and in a few minutes after their in- 
troduction to each other, and after one had 
looked this way, and the other that, and one 
j taken Tip a book and laid it down again, and 
! both looked out of the window, and each 
blushed, and either turned pale, and the gentle- 
man adjusted his collar, and the lady her 
sleeve, and the elder ladies had whispered 
one another in a corner, Dianora, less to her 
astonishment than before, was left in the room 
with him alone. She made a movement as if 
to follow them, but Ippolito said something 
she knew not what, and she remained. She 
went to the window, looking very serious and 
pale, and not daring to glance towards him. He 
intended instantly to go to her, and wondered 
what had become of his fierce impatience ; but 
the very delay had now something delicious in 
it. Oh, the happiness of those moments ! oh, the 
sweet morning-time of those feelings ! the 
doubt which is not doubt, and the hope which 
is but the coming of certainty ! Oh, recollec- 
tions enough to fill faded eyes with tears of 
renovation, and to make us forget we are no 
longer young, the next young and innocent 
beauty we behold ! Why do not such hours 
make us as immortal as they are divine ? Why 
are we not carried away, literally, into some 
place where they can last for ever, leaving 
those who miss us to say, " they were capable 
of loving, and they are gone to heaven !" 
Reader. But, sir, in taking these heavenly 



flights of yours, you have left your two 
lovers. 

Author. Surely, madam, I need not inform 
you that lovers are fond of being left — at least 
to themselves. 

Reader. But, sir, they are Italians ; and I do 
not think Italian lovers were of this bashful 
description. I imagined that the moment your 
two Florentines beheld one another, they 
would spring into each other's arms, sending 
up cries of joy, and- — and — 

Author. Tumbling over the two old women 
by the way. It is a very pretty imagination, 
madam ; but Italians partake of all the feel- 
ings common to human nature ; and modesty 
is really not confined to the English, even 
though they are always saying it is. 

Reader. But I was not speaking of modesty, 
sir, I was only alluding to a sort of, — what 
shall I say — a kind of irrepressible energy, 
that which in the Italian character is called 
violence. 

Author. I meant nothing personal, madam, 
believe me, in using the word modesty. You 
are too charitable, and have too great a regard 
for my lovers. I was not speaking myself of 
modesty in any particular sense, but of mo- 
desty in general ; and all nations, not except- 
ing our beloved and somewhat dictatorial 
countrymen, have their modesties and immo- 
desties too, from which perhaps their example 
might instruct one another. With regard to 
the violence you speak of, and which is energy 
sometimes, and the weakest of weaknesses at 
others, according to the character which ex- 
hibits it, and the occasion that calls it forth, 
the Italians, who live in an ardent climate, 
have undoubtedly shown more of it than most 
people ; but it is only where their individual 
character is most irregular, and education and 
laws at their worst. In general it is nothing 
but pure self-will, and belongs to the two ex- 
tremes of the community — the most powerful, 
whose passions have been indulged, and the 
poorest, whose passions have never been in- 
structed. True energy manifests itself, not in 
violence, but in strength and intensity ; and 
intensity is by its nature discerning, and not 
to be surpassed in quietness, where quietness 
is becoming. Besides, in the age we are writ- 
ing of, there was as much refinement in love 
matters with some, as there was outrage and 
brutality with others. All the faculties of hu- 
manity, bad and good, may be said to have 
been making their way at that period, and try- 
ing for the mastery ; and if on the one hand 
we are presented with horrible spectacles of 
brute passion, tyranny, and revenge, on the 
other we find philosophy and even divinity 
refining upon the sentiment of love, and emu- 
lating the most beautiful subtleties of Plato in 
rendering it a thing angelical. 

Reader. You have convinced me, sir ; pray 
let us proceed. 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



55 



Author. Your us, madam, is flattering ; I 
fancy we are beholding the two lovers in com- 
pany. We are like Don Cleofas and his 
ghostly friend, in the Devil on Two Sticks, 
when they saw into the people's houses ; I, of 
course, the devil ; and you the young student, 
only feminine — Donna Cleofasia, studying hu- 
manity. 

Reader. Well, sir, as you please ; only let us 
proceed. 

Author. Madam, your sentiments are engag- 
ing to the last degree ; so I proceed with plea- 
sure. 

We left our two lovers, madam, standing in 
Gossip Veronica's bed-chamber, one at the 
window, the other at a little distance. They 
remained in this situation about the same 
space of time in which we have been talking. 
Oh ! how impossible it is to present to our- 
selves two grave and happy lovers trembling 
with the approach of their mutual confessions, 
and not feel a graver and happier sensation 
than levity resume its place in one's thoughts. 

Ippolito went up to Dianora. She was still 
looking out of the window, her eyes fixed 
upon the blue mountains in the distance, but 
conscious of nothing outside the room. She 
had a light green and gold net on her head, 
which enclosed her luxuriant hair without vio- 
lence, and seemed as if it took it up that he 
might admire the white neck underneath. She 
felt his breath upon it ; and beginning to ex- 
pect that his lips would follow, raised her 
hands to her head, as if the net required ad- 
justing. This movement, while it disconcerted 
him, presented her waist in a point of view so 
impossible not to touch, that taking it gently 
in both his hands, he pressed one at the same 
time upon her heart, and said, " It will forgive 
me, even for doing this." He had reason to 
say so, for he felt it beat against his fingers, as 
if it leaped. Dianora, blushing and confused, 
though feeling abundantly happy, made ano- 
ther movement with her hands as if to remove 
his own, but he only detained them on either 
side. "Messer Ippolito," said Dianora, in a 
tone as if to remonstrate, though suffering 
herself to remain a prisoner, " I fear you must 
think me" — " No, no," interrupted Ippolito, 
" you can fear nothing that I think, or that I 
do. It is I that have to fear your lovely and 
fearful beauty, which has been ever at the 
side of my sick-bed, and I thought looked 
angrily upon me — upon me alone of the whole 
world." "They told me you had been ill," 
said Dianora in a very gentle tone, " and my 
aunt perhaps knew that I — thought that I — 
Have you been very ill V And without think- 
ing, she drew her left hand from under his, 
and placed it upon it. " Very," answered Ip- 
polito ; "do not I look so?" and saying this, 
he raised his other hand, and venturing to put 
it round to the left side of her little dimpled 
chin, turned her face towards him. Dianora 



did not think he appeared so ill, by a good 
deal, as he did in the church ; but there was 
enough in his face, ill or well, to make her 
eyesight swim as she looked at him ; and the 
next moment her head was upon his shoulder, 
and his lips descended, welcome, upon hers. 

There was a practice in those times, gene- 
rated, like other involuntary struggles against 
wrong, by the absurdities in authority, of re- 
sorting to marriages, or rather plightings of 
troth, made in secret, and in the eye of hea- 
ven. It was a custom liable to great abuse, 
as all secrecies are ; but the harm of it, as 
usual, fell chiefly on the poor, or where the 
condition of the parties was unequal. Where 
the families were powerful and on an equality, 
the hazard of violating the engagement was, 
for obvious reasons, very great, and seldom en- 
countered ; the lovers either foregoing their 
claims on each other upon better acquaintance, 
or adhering to their engagement the closer for 
the same reason, or keeping it at the expense 
of one or the other's repentance for fear of the 
consequences. The troth of Ippolito and Di- 
anora was indeed a troth. They plighted it 
on their knees, before a picture of the Virgin 
and Child, in Veronica's bed-room, and over a 
mass-book which lay open upon a chair. Ip- 
polito then, for the pleasure of revenging him- 
self on the pangs he suffered when Dianora 
knelt with him before, took up the mass-book 
and held it before her, as she had held it be- 
fore him, and looked her entreatingly in the 
face ; and Dianora took and held it with him 
as before, trembling as then, but with a per- 
fect pleasure ; and Ippolito kissed her twice 
and thrice out of a sweet revenge. — [We find 
we are in the habit of using a great number of 
ands on these occasions. We do not affect it, 
though we are conscious of it. It is partly, 
we believe, owing to our recollections of the 
good faith and simplicity in the old romances, 
and partly to a certain sense of luxury and 
continuance which these ands help to link to- 
gether. It is the fault of " the accursed criti- 
cal spirit," which is the bane of these times, 
that we are obliged to be conscious of the mat- 
ter at all. But we cannot help not having 
been born six hundred years ago, and are 
obliged to be base and reviewatory like the rest. 
To affect not to be conscious of the critical in 
these times, would itself be a departure from 
what is natural ; but we notice the necessity 
only to express our hatred of it, and hereby 
present the critics (ourselves included, as far 
as we belong to them) with our hearty discom- 
mendations ] 

The thoughtless old ladies, Donna Lucrezia 
and the other (for old age is not always the 
most considerate thing in the world, especially 
the old age of one's aunts and gossips), had 
now returned into the room where they left 
the two lovers ; but not before Dianora had 
consented to receive her bridegroom in her 



56 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



own apartment at home, that same night, by- 
means of that other old good-natured go-be- 
tween, yclept a ladder of ropes. The rest of 
the afternoon was spent, according to laudable 
custom, in joining in the diversions of the pea- 
santry. They sung, they danced, they ate the 
grapes that hung over their heads, they gave 
and took jokes and flowers, they flaunted with 
all their colours in the sun, they feasted with 
all their might under the trees. You could 
not say which looked the ripest and merriest, 
the fruit or their brown faces. In Tuscany 
they have had from time immemorial little 
rustic songs or stanzas that turn upon flowers. 
One of these, innocently addressed to Dianora 
by way of farewell, put her much out of coun- 
tenance — " Voi siete un bel fiore," sung a pea- 
sant girl, after kissing her hand .- — 

You are a lovely flower. What flower ? The flower 
That shuts with the dark hour :— 

Would that to keep you awake were in my power ! 

Ippolito went singing it all the way home, and 
ran up against a hundred people. 

Ippolito had noticed a ladder of ropes which 
was used in his father's house for some domes- 
tic purposes. To say the truth, it was an old 
servant, and had formerly been much in re- 
quest for the purpose to which it was now 
about to be turned, by the old gentleman him- 
self. He was indeed a person of a truly or- 
thodox description, having been much given 
to intrigue in his younger days, being con- 
signed over to avarice in his older, and exhi- 
biting great submission to everything esta- 
blished, always. Accordingly, he was consi- 
dered as a personage equally respectable for 
his virtues, as important from his rank and 
connexions ; and if hundreds of ladders could 
have risen up in judgment against him, they 
would only have been considered as what are 
called in England " wild oats ;" — wild ladders, 
which it was natural for every gentleman to 
plant. 

Ippolito's character, however, being more 
principled, his privileges were not the same ; 
and on every account he was obliged to take 
great care. He waited with impatience till 
midnight, and then letting himself out of his 
window, and taking the ropes under his cloak, 
made the best of his way to a little dark lane 
which bordered the house of the Bardi. One 
of the windows of Dianora's chamber looked 
into the lane, the others into the garden. The 
house stood in a remote part of the city. Ip- 
polito listened to the diminishing sound of the 
guitars and revellers in the distance, and was 
proceeding to inform Dianora of his arrival 
by throwing up some pebbles, when he heard 
a noise coming. It was some young men tak- 
ing a circuit of the more solitary streets, to 
purify them, as they said, from sobriety. Ip- 
polito slunk into a corner. He was afraid, as 
the sound opened upon his ears, that they 
would turn down the lane ; but the hubbub 



passed on. He stepped forth from his corner, 
and again retreated. Two young men, loi- 
terers behind the rest, disputed whether they 
should go down the lane. One, who seemed 
intoxicated, swore he would serenade "the 
little foe," as he called her, if it was only to 
vex the old one, and " bring him out with his 
cursed long sword." " And a lecture twice as 
long," said the other. " Ah, there you have 
me," quoth the musician; "his sword is — a 
sword ; but his lecture's the devil : reaches 
the other side of the river — never stops till it 
strikes one sleepy. But I must serenade." 
"No, no," returned his friend; "remember 
what the Grand Prior said, and don't let us 
commit ourselves in a petty brawl. We'll 
have it out of their hearts some day." Ippo- 
lito shuddered to hear such words, even from 
one of his own party. " Don't tell me," said 
the pertinacious drunken man ; " I remember 
what the Grand Prior said. He said, I must 
serenade ; no, he didn't say I must serenade — 
but / say it ; the Grand Prior said, says he, — 
I remember it as if it was yesterday — he said 
— gentlemen, said he, there are three good 
things in the world, love, music, and lighting ; 
and then he said a cursed number of other 
things by no means good ; and all to prove, 
philosophically, you rogue, that love was good, 
and music was good, and fighting was good, 
philosophically, and in a cursed number of pa- 
ragraphs. So I must serenade." " False logic, 
Vanni," cried the other ; " so come along, or 
we shall have the enemy upon us in a heap, 
for I hear another party coming, and I am 
sure they are none of ours." " Good again,'' 
said the musician, " love and fighting, my boy, 
and music ; so I'll have my song before they 
come up." And the fellow began roaring out 
one of the most indecent songs he could think 
of, which made our lover ready to start forth 
and dash the guitar in his face ; but he re- 
pressed himself. In a minute he heard the 
other party come up. A clashing of swords 
ensued, and to his great relief the drunkard 
and his companion were driven on. In a mi- 
nute or two all was silent. Ippolito gave the 
signal — it was acknowledged ; the rope was 
fixed ; and the lover was about to ascend, 
when he was startled with a strange diminu- 
tive face, smiling at him over a light. His 
next sensation was to smile at the state of his 
own nerves ; for it was but a few minutes be- 
fore, that he was regretting he could not put 
out a lantern that stood burning under a little 
image of the Virgin. He crossed himself, of- 
fered up a prayer for the success of his true 
love, and again proceeded to mount the ladder. 
Just as his hand reached the window, he 
thought he heard other steps. He looked 
down towards the street. Two figures evi- 
dently stood at the corner of the lane. He 
would have concluded them to be the two men 
returned, but for their profound silence. At 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



57 



| last one of them said out loud, " I am certain 
I saw a shadow of somebody by the lantern, 
j and now you find we have not come back for 
I nothing. Who's there ?" added he, coming at 
J the same time down the lane with his compa- 
nion. Ippolito descended rapidly, intending 
to hide his face as much as possible in his hood 
and escape by dint of fighting, but his foot 
slipped in the ropes, and he was at the same 
instant seized by the strangers. The instinct 
of a lover, who above all things in the world 
cared for his mistress's reputation, supplied 
our hero with an artifice as quick as lightning. 
"They are all safe," said he, affecting to 
tremble with a cowardly terror, " I have not 
touched one of them.'' "One of what ?" said 
the others; "what are all safe?" "The 
jewels," replied Ippolito ; " let me go for the 
love of God, and it shall be my last offence, 
as it was my first. Besides, I meant to restore 
them." "Restore them!" cried the first 
spokesman; "a pretty jest truly. This must 
be some gentleman gambler by his fine would- 
be conscience ; and by this light we will see 
who he is, if it is only for your sake, Filippo, 
eh ?" For his companion was a pretty noto- 
rious gambler himself, and Ippolito had kept 
cringing in the dark. " Curse it," said Filippo, 
" never mind the fellow ; he is not worth our 
while in these stirring times, though I warrant 
he has cheated me often enough." To say the 
truth, Messer Filippo was not a little afraid 
the thief would turn out to be some inexpe- 
rienced desperado, whom he had cheated him- 
self, and perhaps driven to this very crime ; 
j but his companion was resolute, and Ippolito 
finding it impossible to avoid his fate, came 
forward into the light. " By all the saints in 
the calendar," exclaimed the enemy, " a Buon- 
delmonte ! and no less a Buondelmonte than 
the worthy and very magnificent Messer Ippo- 
lito Buondelmonte ! Messer Ippolito, I kiss 
your hands ; I am very much your humble 
servant and thief-taker. By my faith, this will 
be fine news for to-morrow." 

To-morrow was indeed a heavy day to all 
the Buondelmonti, and as merry a one to all 
the Bardi, except poor Dianora. She knew 
not what had prevented Ippolito from finish- 
ing his ascent up the ladder ; some interrup- 
tion it must have been ; but of what nature 
she could not determine, nor why he had not 
resumed his endeavours. It could have been 
nothing common. Was he known ? Was she 
known ? Was it all known ? And the poor girl 
tormented herself with a thousand fears. Ma- 
donna Lucrezia hastened to her the first thing 
in the morning, with a full, true, and particu- 
lar account. Ippolito de' Buondelmonti had 
been seized, in coining down a rope-ladder 
from one of the front windows of the house, 
with a great drawn sword in one hand and a 
box of jewels in the other. Dianora saw the 
whole truth in a moment, and from excess of 



sorrow, gratitude, and love, fainted away. Ma- 
donna Lucrezia guessed the truth too, but was 
almost afraid to confess it to her own mind, 
much more to speak of it aloud ; and had not 
the news, and the bustle, and her niece's faint- 
ing, furnished her with something to do, she 
could have fainted herself very heartily, out 
of pure consternation. Gossip Veronica was 
in a worse condition when thel news reached 
her ; and Ippolito's mother, who guessed but 
too truly as well as the others, was seized with 
an illness, which joining with the natural 
weakness of her constitution, threw her into 
a stupor, and prevented her from attending to 
anything. The next step of Madonna Lucre- 
zia, after seeing Dianora out of her fainting 
fit, and giving the household to understand 
that the story of the robber had alarmed her, 
was to go to Gossip Veronica and concert mea- 
sures of concealment. The two women wept 
very sincerely for the poor youth, and admired 
his heroism in saving his mistress's honour ; 
but with all their good-nature, they agreed 
that he was quite in the right, and that it 
would be but just to his magnanimity, and to 
their poor dear Dianora, to keep the secret as 
closely. Madonna Lucrezia then returned 
home, to be near Dianora, and help to baffle 
inquiry ; while Gossip Veronica kept close in- 
doors, too ill to see visitors, and alternately 
praying to the saint her namesake, and taking 
reasonable draughts of Montepulciano. 

In those days there were too many wild 
young men of desperate fortunes to render 
Ippolito's confession improbable. Besides, he 
had been observed of late to be always without 
money ; reports of his being addicted to 
gambling had arisen ; and his father was ava- 
ricious. Lastly, his groaning in the church 
was remembered, under pretence of pity ; and 
the magistrate (who was of the hostile party) 
concluded, with much sorrow, that he must 
have more sins to answer for than they knew 
of, which in so young a man was deplorable. 
The old gentleman had too much reason to 
know, that in older persons it would have been 
nothing remarkable. 

Ippolito, with a grief of heart which only 
served to confirm the bye-standers in their 
sense of his guilt, waited in expectation of his 
sentence. He thought it would be banish- 
ment, and was casting in his mind how he 
could hope some day or other to get a sight of 
his mistress, when the word Death fell on him 
like a thunderbolt. The origin of a sentence 
so severe was but too plain to every body ; but 
the Bardi were uppermost that day ; and the 
city, exhausted by some late party excesses, 
had but too much need of repose. Still it was 
thought a dangerous trial of the public pulse. 
The pity felt for the tender age of Ippolito 
was increased by the anguish which he found 
himself unable to repress. "Good God!" 
cried he, " must I die so young ? And must I 



58 



THE FLORENTINE LOVERS. 



never see — must I never see the light again, 
and Florence, and my dear friends ?" And he 
fell into almost abject entreaties to be spared ; 
for he thought of Dianora. But the by- 
standers fancied that he was merely afraid of 
death ; and by the help of suggestions from 
the Bardi partisans, their pity almost turned 
into contempt. He prostrated himself at the 
magistrate's feet ; he kissed his knees ; he 
disgusted his own father ; till finding every- 
thing against him, and smitten at once with a 
sense of his cowardly appearance and the ne- 
cessity of keeping his mistress's honour invio- 
lable, he declared his readiness to die like a 
man, and at the same time stood wringing his 
hands, and weeping like an infant. He was 
sentenced to die next day. 

The day came. The hour came. The 
Standard of Justice was hoisted before the 
door of the tribunal, and the trumpet blew 
through the city, announcing the death of a 
criminal. Dianora, to whom the news had 
been gradually broken, heard it in her cham- 
ber, and would have burst forth and pro- 
claimed the secret but for Madonna Lucrezia, 
who spoke of her father, and mother, and all 
the Bardi, and the inutility of attempting to 
save one of the opposite faction, and the 
dreadful consequences to every body if the 
secret were betrayed. Dianora heard little 
about everybody ; but the habit of respecting 
her father and mother, and dreading their 
reproaches, kept her, moment after moment, 
from doing anything but listen and look pale ; 
and, in the meantime, the procession began 
moving towards the scaffold. 

Ippolito issued forth from the prison, look- 
ing more like a young martyr than a criminal. 
He was now perfectly quiet, and a sort of 
unnatural glow had risen into his cheeks, the 
result of the enthusiasm and conscious self- 
sacrifice into which he had worked himself 
during the night. He had only prayed, as a 
last favour, that he might be taken through 
the street in which the house of the Bardi 
stood ; for he had lived, he said, as everybody 
knew, in great hostility with that family, and 
he now felt none any longer, and wished to 
bless the house as he passed it. The magis- 
trate, for more reasons than one, had no objec- 
tion ; the old confessor, with tears in his eyes, 
said that the dear boy would still be an honour 
to his family, as surely as he would be a saint 
in heaven ; and the procession moved on. The 
main feeling of the crowd, as usual, was that 
of curiosity, but there were few indeed, in 
whom it was not mixed with pity ; and many 
females found the sight so intolerable, that 
they were seen coming away down the streets, 
weeping bitterly, and unable to answer the 
questions of those they met. 

The procession now began to pass the house 
of the Bardi. Ippolito's face, for an instant, 
turned of a chalky whiteness, and then re- 



sumed its colour. His lips trembled, his eyes 
filled with tears ; and thinking his mistress 
might possibly be at the window, taking a last 
look of the lover that died for her, he bowed 
his head gently, at the same time forcing a 
smile, which glittered through his watery eyes. 
At that instant the trumpet blew its dreary 
blast for the second time. Dianora had al- 
ready risen on her couch, listening, and asking 
what noise it was that approached. Her aunt 
endeavoured to quiet her with excuses ; but 
this last noise aroused her beyond control ; 
and the good old lady, forgetting herself in 
the condition of the two lovers, no longer at- 
tempted to stop her. " Go," said she, " in 
God's name, my child, and Heaven be with 
you." 

Dianora, her hair streaming, her eye without 
a tear, her cheek on fire, burst, to the asto- 
nishment of her kindred, into the room where 
they were all standing. She tore them aside 
from one of the windows with a preternatural 
strength, and, stretching forth her head and 
hands, like one inspired, cried out, " Stop ! 
stop ! it is my Ippolito ! my husband !" And, 
so saying, she actually made a movement as if 
she would have stepped to him out of the win- 
dow ; for everything but his image faded from 
her eyes. A movement of confusion took 
place among the multitude. Ippolito stood 
rapt on the sudden, trembling, weeping, and 
stretching his hands towards the window, as if 
praying to his guardian angel. The kinsmen 
would have prevented her from doing any- 
thing further ; but, as if all the gentleness of 
her character was gone, she broke from them 
with violence and contempt, and rushing down 
stairs into the street, exclaimed, in a frantic 
manner, " People ! Dear God ! Countrymen ! 
I am a Bardi ; he is a Buondelmonte ; he 
loved me; and that is the whole crime!" 
and, at these last words, they were locked in 
each other's arms. 

The populace now broke through all re- 
straint. They stopped the procession ; they 
bore Ippolito back again to the seat of the 
magistracy, carrying Dianora with him ; they 
described in a peremptory manner the mis- 
take ; they sent for the heads of the two 
houses ; they made them swear a treaty of 
peace, amity, and unity ; and in half an hour 
after the lover had been on the road to his 
death, he set out upon it again, the acknow- 
ledged bridegroom of the beautiful creature 
by his side. 

Never was such a sudden revulsion of feel- 
ing given to a whole city. The women who 
had retreated in anguish, came back the gay- 
est of the gay. Everybody plucked all the 
myrtles they could find, to put into the hands 
of those who made the former procession, and 
who now formed a singular one for a bridal ; 
but all the young women fell in with their 
white veils ; and instead of the funeral dirge, 



RHYME AND REASON. 



59 



a song of thanksgiving was chanted. The 
very excess of their sensations enabled the 
two lovers to hold up. Ippolito's cheeks, 
which seemed to have fallen away in one 
night, appeared to have plumped out again 
faster ; and if he was now pale instead of high- 
coloured, the paleness of Dianora had given 
way to radiant blushes which made up for it. 
He looked, as he ought, — like the person 
saved ; she, like the angelic saviour. 

Thus the two lovers passed on, as if in a 
dream tumultuous but delightful. Neither of 
them looked on the other ; they gazed hither 
and thither on the crowd, as if in answer to 
the blessings that poured upon them ; but 
their hands were locked fast ; and they went 
I like one soul in a divided body. 



LVIIL— RHYME AND REASON : 

OR A NEW PROPOSAL TO THE PUBLIC RESPECTING 
POETRY IN ORDINARY. 

A friend of ours the other day, taking up 
the miscellaneous poems of Tasso, read the 
title-page into English as follows : — " The 
Rhymes of the Lord Twisted Yew, Amorous, 
Bosky, and Maritime." * The Italians exhibit 
a modesty worthy of imitation in calling their 
Miscellaneous Poems, Rhymes. Twisted Yew 
himself, with all his genius, has put forth an 
abundance of these terminating blossoms, 
without any fruit behind them : and his coun- 
trymen of the present day do not scruple to 
confess, that their living poetry consists of 
little else. The French have a game at verses, 
called Rhymed Ends (Bouts Rimes) which 
they practise a great deal more than they are 
aware ; and the English, though they are 
a more poetical people, and lay claim to the 
character of a less vain one, practise the same 
game to a very uncandid extent, without so 
much as allowing that the title is applicable to 
any part of it. 

Yet how many "Poems" are there among 
all these nations, of which we require no more 
than the Rhymes, to be acquainted with the 
whole of them ? You know what the rogues 
have done, by the ends they come to. For in- 
stance, what more is necessary to inform us of 
all which the following gentleman has for sale, 
than the bell which he tinkles at the end of 
his cry ? We are as sure of him, as of the 



muffin-man. 


A LOVE-SONG. 






Grove, 
Night, 
Rove, 
Delight 


Heart. 
Prove, 
Impart, 
Love. 




Kiss 
Blest 
Bliss 
Rest. 


Was there 
Ever a series 


ever peroration more eloquent ? 
of catastrophes more explanatory 



* Rime del Signor Torquato Tasso, Amorose, Bosche- 
reccie, Marittime, &c. 



of their previous history ? Did any Chinese 
gentleman ever show the amount of his breed- 
ing and accomplishments more completely, by 
the nails which he carries at his fingers' ends ? 
The Italian Rimatori are equally compre- 
hensive. We no sooner see the majority of 
their rhymes, than we long to save the mo- 
desty of their general pretensions so much 
trouble in making out their case. Their cores 
and amoves are not to be disputed. Cursed is 
he that does not put implicit reliance upon 
their fedelta ! — that makes inquisition why the 
possessor piu superbo m. They may take the 
oaths and their seat at once. For example — 



Ben mio 
OhDio 
Per te. 



Fuggito 
Rapito 
Dame. 



And again — 



With- 



Amata 
Sdegnata 
Turbata 
Irata 
Furore 
Dolore 
Non so. 



O cielo 
Dal gielo 
Tradire 
Languire 
Mori re 
Soffrire 
Non puo* 



Where is the dull and inordinate person that 
would require these rhymes to be filled up ? 
If they are brief as the love of which they 
complain, are they not pregnant in conclusions, 
full of a world of things that have passed, in- 
finitely retrospective, embracing, and enough ? 
If not " vast," are they not " voluminous ? " 

It is doubtless an instinct of this kind that 
has made so many modern Italian poets inter- 
sperse their lyrics with those frequent single 
words, which are at once line and rhyme, 
and which some of our countrymen have in 
vain endeavoured to naturalise in the English 
opera. Not that they want the same preg- 
nancy in our language, but because they are 
neither so abundant nor so musical ; and be- 
sides, there is something in the rest of our 
verses, however common-place, which seems 
to be laughing at the incursion of these viva- 
cious strangers, as if it were a hop suddenly 
got up, and unseasonably. We do not natur- 
ally take to anything so abrupt and saltatory. 

This objection, however, does not apply to 
the proposal we are about to make. Our 
rhymers must rhyme ; and as there is a great 
difference between single words thus mingled 
with longer verses, and the same rhymes in 
their proper places, it has struck us, that a 
world of time and paper might be saved to the 
ingenious rimatore, whether Italian or English, 
by foregoing at once all the superfluous part 



60 



EHYME AND REASON. 



of his verses ; that is to say, all the rest of 
them ; and confining himself, entirely, to these 
very sufficing terminations. We subjoin some 
specimens in the various kinds of poetry ; and 
inform the intelligent bookseller, that we are 
willing to treat with him for any quantity at a 
penny a hundred. 







A PASTORAL. 






Dawn 


Each 


Fair 


Me 


Ray 


Plains 


Spoke 


Mine 


Too 


Heat 


Lawn 


Beech 


Hair 


Free 


Play 


Swains 


Yoke. 


Divine. 


Woo. 


Sweet. 


Tune 


Fields 


Shades 


Adieu 


Farewell 


Lays 


Bowers 


Darts 


Flock3 


Cows 


Moon 


Yields 


Maids 


Renew 


Dell 


Gaze. 


Flowers. 


Hearts. 


Rocks. 


Boughs. 



Here, without any more ado, we have the 
whole history of a couple of successful rural 
lovers comparing notes. They issue forth in 
the morning ; fall into the proper place and 
dialogue ; record the charms and kindness of 
their respective mistresses ; do justice at the 
same time to the fields and shades ; and con- 
clude by telling their flocks to wait as usual 
while they renew their addresses under the, 
boughs. How easily is all this gathered from 
the rhymes ! and how worse than useless would 
it be in two persons, who have such interesting 
avocations, to waste their precious time and 
the reader's in a heap of prefatory remarks, 
falsely called verses ! 

Of Love-songs we have already had speci- 
mens ; and, by the bye, we did not think it 
necessary to give any French examples of our 
involuntary predecessors in this species of 
writing. The yeux and dangereux, viol and foi, 
charmes and larmes, are too well-known as well 
as too numerous to mention. We proceed to 
lay before the reader a Prologue ; which, if 
spoken by a pretty actress, with a due sprink- 
ling of nods and becks, and a judicious man- 
agement of the pauses, would have an effect 
equally novel and triumphant. The reader is 
aware that a Prologue is generally made up of 
some observations on the drama in general, 
followed by an appeal in favour of the new 
one, some compliments to the nation, and a 
regular climax in honour of the persons ap- 
pealed to. We scarcely need observe, that 
the rhymes should be read slowly, in order to 
give effect to the truly understood remarks in 
the intervals. 



Age 



Mind 

Mankind 

Face 

Trace 

Sigh 

Tragedy 

Scene 

Spleen 

Pit 

Wit 



PROLOGUE. 

Fashion 
British Nation. 

Young 

Tongue 

Bard 

Reward 

Hiss 

Miss 

Dare 

British fair 



Applause 

Virtue's Cause 

Trust 

Just 

Fear 

Here 

Stands 

Hands 

True 

You. 



Here we have some respectable observations 
on the advantages of the drama in every age, 
on the wideness of its survey, the different 
natures of tragedy and comedy, the vicissi- 
tudes of fashion, and the permanent greatness 
of the British empire. Then the young bard, 
new to the dramatic art, is introduced. He 
disclaims all hope of reward for any merit of 
his own, except that which is founded on a 
proper sense of the delicacy and beauty of his 
fair auditors, and his zeal in the cause of 
virtue. To this, at ail events, he is sure his 
critics will be just ; and though he cannot help 
feeling a certain timidity, standing where he 
does, yet upon the whole, as becomes an 
Englishman, he is perfectly willing to abide 
by the decision of his countrymen's hands, 
hoping that he shall be found 



to sense, if not to genius, true, 



And trusts his cause to virtue, and — to You. 

Should the reader, before he comes to this ex- 
plication of the Prologue, have had any other 
ideas suggested by it, we will undertake to 
say, that they will at all events be found to 
have a wonderful general similitude ; and it is 
to be observed, that this very flexibility of 
adaptation is one of the happiest and most 
useful results of our proposed system of poetry. 
It comprehends all the possible common-places 
in vogue ; and it also leaves to the ingenious 
reader something to fill up ; which is a com- 
pliment that has always been held due to him 
by the best authorities. 

The next specimen is what, in a more super- 
fluous condition of metre, would have been 
entitled Lines on Time. It is much in that 
genteel didactic taste, which is at once think- 
ing and non-thinking, and has a certain neat 
and elderly dislike of innovation in it, greatly 
to the comfort of the seniors who adorn the 
circles. 



Time 

Sublime 

Fraught 

Thought 

Power 

Devour 

Rust 

Dust 

Glass 

Pass 

Wings 

Kings 



Child 

Beguiled 

Boy 

Joy 

Man 

Span 

Sire 

Expire 

So 
Go 



Race 

Trace 

All 

Ball 

Pride 

Deride 

Aim 

Same 

Undo 

New 



Hold 

Old 

Sure 

Endure 

Death 

Breath 

Forgiven 

Heaven. 



We ask any impartial reader, whether he 
could possibly Avant a more sufficing account 
of the progress of this author's piece of rea- 
soning upon Time ? There is, first, the address 
to the hoary god, with all his emblems and 
consequence about him, the scythe excepted ; 
that being an edge-tool to rhymers, which they 
judiciously keep inside the verse, as in a sheath. 
And then we are carried through all the stages 
of human existence, the caducity of which the 



VICISSITUDES OF A LECTURE. 



61 



writer applies to the world at large, impressing 
upon us the inutility of hope and exertion, 
and suggesting of course the propriety of 
thinking just as he does upon all subjects, po- 
litical and moral, past, present, and to come. 
1822. 



LIX.— VICISSITUDES OF A LECTURE; 

OR, PUBLIC ELEGANCE AND PRIVATE NON-PAR- 
TICULARITY. 

Poor Ned Pounchy ! He is no longer 
alive ; otherwise we should not risk the 
wounding of his good-natured eyes by these 
pages. Neither was he ever known enough to 
the many to undergo the hazard of their now 
digging him up again ; and, finally, we have 
obscured the illustrious obscurity of his name 
by an alias. We may, therefore, without 
offence, resuscitate a passage in his life, for the 
amusement of those critical readers, whom it 
was his highest ambition to gratify. 

Ned Pounchy had long been seized with 
a passionate desire to give a lecture — his 
favourite mode of literary intercourse — and on 
Shakspeare and Milton— his favourite poets. 
Accordingly, after a series of blissful prepara- 
tions and half-threatening obstacles, which 
only perfected the pleasure of the result, he 
found himself one evening at the upper end of 
a great room in a certain tavern, standing with 
book in hand, and in most consummate black 
satin small-clothes and silk stockings (the 
former very crinkled and scholarly), with a 
great screen at his back, and an expectant set 
of beholders in front of him, to whom he had 
undertaken to set forth the merits of a scene 
or two in the Tempest, and to recite Milton's 
charming poems, Allegro and Pensieroso. 

Now our friend Pounchy, or rather our 
friend's friend (for we had no particular know- 
ledge of him, except on this occasion) was a 
somewhat stout and short man, like many an 
eminent individual before and since, of some 
forty or five-and-forty years of age ; and if, 
unlike them, he seemed to think his person 
qualified to compete with his intellectual at- 
tractions, and to require only « a fair stage and 
no favour," yet his genial disposition did 
(there can be no doubt of it) instinctively 
suggest to itself, that the favour would be 
granted him ; and in fact, he appeared so cosy 
and comfortable, and after-dinner-like, in the 
very midst of a certain elevation of neckcloth 
and powdered head, that it was impossible not 
to sympathise with his satisfaction, and be 
prepared to relish whatever taste he should be 
pleased to give us of his critical nicety. He 
had no rostrum, or desk, before him. All in 
that respect was open and above-board ; un- 
disguised as his good faith ; and as he walked 
to and fro, his shoes creaked a little. 



Suddenly, after a brief but serious confer- 
ence with some head that emerged from be- 
hind the screen, and returning towards us with 
a hum and haw, intermingled with applications 
of white handkerchief, he opened upon his 
audience with a brief introduction to the first 
scene of the Tempest. His tones were of an 
importance commensurate with the fame of 
his author ; and none of the homely seaman- 
ship in the text beguiled him, for an instant, 
out of a due respect for it. Not that he 
omitted to expatiate on the extreme natural- 
ness of the scene. That was a point, which 
Ned evidently regarded as one of the most 
serious objects of his duty to impress upon us. 
He could not have been more emphatic, or 
given us greater time to deliberate on what we 
heard, had he recited the soliloquy in Hamlet. 
Thus, instead of those excellent but too un- 
critical imitators of seamen, Mr. T. P. Cooke, 
Mr. Smith, and others, conceive the following 
exordium of the play set forth in its utmost 
solemnity of articulation by the mouth of Mr. 
Ward or Mr. Barrymore, — accompanied fur- 
thermore by a mention, at once particular and 
careless, and singularly incorporating itself 
with the text, of the name of the party speak- 
ing ; — which, if you reflect upon it, was a very 
great nicety, and showed the lecturer's just 
sense of all which he could be expected to 
combine in his delivery, as holding the double 
office of reader and performer. Repeat, for 
instance, out loud, and very slowly, the follow- 
ing words ; and the sound of your voice will 
enable you the better to appreciate our critic's 
delicacy : — 

Enter a Shipmaster and a Boatswain. 
Master Boatswain — 

(which you are to read as if he was speaking 
of a young gentleman of the name of Boat- 
swain, son of John Boatswain, Esq. — " Master 
Boatswain,") 

Boatswain Here, master ; what — cheer — 
("What — cheer," very slow and pompous.) 

Master Good 
(here another young gentleman, son of Thomas 
Good, Esquire — young " Master Good.") 

—speak— to— the mariner— fall— to it— yarely, or we 
run ourselves — aground — Bestir — bestir. 

(Bestir, bestir, very wide apart, and all pomp- 
ous.) 

Exit — Master. Enter — Mariners. 
Boatswain Heigh — 

(Here it seems to transpire that the boat- 
swain's name is Heigh or Hay — Boatswain 
Hay.) 

Boatswain Heigh— my heart — cheerly— cheerly— my 
heart ; — yare— yare — Take in — the topsail 

(all observe, as if he were reading some 
mighty text in a pulpit) 

—take in— the topsail— tend— to the master's— whistle— 
And so he went on, amidst the deep and 
admiring silence of the spectators, whose 



62 



VICISSITUDES OF A LECTURE. 



shoulders you might observe, here and there, 
gradually begin shaking, out of some irrepres- 
sible emotion. A wag who has a lively but 
confused recollection of the scene, insists that 
there was a passage in the dialogue, which 
upon examination we cannot find, but which 
he delights to repeat as having been thus 
delivered, — very slow and pompous, yet with 
the remarkable absence of stops between the 
names and words of the speakers, and all in a 
level tone — 

First Boatswain Hip — hollo-a 

Second Boatswain Hollo-a — hip. 

But this is manifestly a figment, superinduced 
upon a strongly excited fancy. 

Of the rest of this scene from the Tempest, 
singularly enough, we have no sort of recol- 
lection. Whether this forgetfulness be owing 
to some unremembered stoppage on the part of 
the reciter, or to the criticisms of the friends 
about us, or some uproarious sympathy ana- 
logous to the tumult on board ship, we cannot 
say ; but the thing has clean gone out of our 
memory. All we can call to mind is a little 
thin old gentleman, probably a friend of the 
lecturer's, who kept going about among the 
benches, smiling, and apparently asking the 
ladies how they liked it ; and exhibiting a 
hand laden with rings. 

But now came the Allegro. Our memory 
serves us very well on this point, for reasons 
which will be obvious. 

Hence, — loathed — MEL-ancholy 
began Ned, in the most vehement, but at the 
same time dignified manner you can conceive 
— absolutely startling us — his mouth thrust 
out, his eye fierce, his right arm extended at 
full length, tossing his head, and then pointing ; 
— in short, telling Melancholy to go to the 
greatest possible distance, and as if showing 
her whereabouts it was. 
Hence— loathed— Melancholy— 
Of Cerberus — 'and — BLACK-est — midnight born 

("blackest" excessively black on the first 

syllable) 

In — Stygian — cave — forlorn — 

Midst— horrid shapes— and sights— and shrieks— unholy— 

" unholy" with an immense emphasis on the o 
— and so he went on till he came to the words 
" Come and trip it ;" for though the feeling in 
the poet's mind changes wonderfully from the 
repelling to the engaging, in that alteration of 
the measure, where he says " But come, thou 
goddess fair and free," yet Ned seemed to 
think, that as both the passages were equally 
good, it was his duty to regard their merits 
with impartiality, and not risk the appreciation 
of the cheerfuller lines by any levity of ap- 
proach. His "Come— thou Goddess— fair— 
and free" was therefore delivered in precisely 
the same tones as the rest, — immeasurably 
grave, earnest, and emphatical, and as if every 
syllable he uttered was commissioned to main- | 



tain the united dignity of the poetical and 
reciting characters. 

But now comes, not only the cheerfulness, 
but the catastrophe. " Great wits have short 
memories," said somebody ; probably because 
he had one himself. Ned however was at all 
events a brother instance ; for after getting 
through the " Graces," and " Aurora," and the 
" fresh-blown roses," and " quips and cranks," 
&c, with the most extraordinary solemnity 
(and it was no great distance to get) he stuck 
fast at the very spot where he was bound to 
proceed in his happiest manner ; to wit, upon 
the line, 

" Come and trip it, as you go. " 
He remembered " Come and trip it ;" but he 
could not, for the life of him, conjure up " as 
you go." 

The head behind the screen was now heard, 
prompting — 

" Come and trip it, as you go. " 
But Ned, it turned out, was unfortunately 
deaf, and the words were lost upon him. 

" Come and trip it, as you go," 
said the voice, still in a whisper, but with 
greater emphasis. 

In vain. — Ned bent his head again to catch 
the words, and again they were repeated with 
emphasis still greater, but always in a whis- 
per — 

" Come and trip it, as you go. * 

In vain again. — Once more Ned bent his 
head, with all its painstaking and powder ; and 
again the words were sent forth, in a sort of 
whisper in a rage ; 

" Come and trip it, AS YOU GO. " 
"Good God!" the whisper seemed to say, 
a Will you never hear me ?" 

The reader must imagine the audience all 
this time, hearing what the lecturer could not 
hear, as plainly as their own words, and ready 
to burst. 

At length he does catch the words ; and 
with an irresistible air of hilarity and self- 
satisfaction (as if the little obstacle were re- 
moved from between him and his triumphs) 
resumes his stately way — 

" Come — and trip it — as you go — 
On the light 

(" light" very heavy) 

fantastic-toe 
(" fantastic," imperious) 

And— in thy— right hand— lead— with thee 
The mountain — nymph — sweet — liberty 
And— if I— give thee— honour— due- 
Mirth,— admit me— of— thy crew— 
To live— with her— and live— with thee 
In — un — reproved — pleasures — free." 
Alas ! while in the act of arriving at these 
pleasures, and little thinking that he was 
about to disclose what they were, he unfortu- 
nately kept stepping backwarder and back- 
warder, till in a moment he bolted against the 



THE FORTUNES OF GENIUS. 



63 



screen, and down it went ! — exhibiting, — 
besides the enraged individual to whom the 
voice belonged, — what do you think ? 

A bottle of wine and some cakes ? 

No. 

A few oranges, perhaps ? 

By no means. 

A sandwich ? 

Not in the least. 

What then ? 

— A pot of ale and some bread and cheese. * 

There was no harm in it. Geniuses have 
made many a hearty meal upon bread and 
cheese, and been glad that they could get it ; 
only, somehow, the highly poetical dignity of 
the recitation, the immense idealism of the 
lecturer, and the aristocracy of the satin small- 
clothes, had not prepared the spectators for so 
unsophisticate a refreshment ; and they were 
glad to pretend an outcry of alarm and sym- 
pathy, in order to drown what they could of 
the otherwise inextinguishable laughter which 
shook the place. 

What followed we totally forget, perhaps 
because we came away ; but never shall we 
forget thee, and thy publicities and retire- 
ments, honest Ned Pounchy. 



LX.— THE FORTUNES OF GENIUS. 

In the Atlas, the other day, was an article, 
under the above title, the following passages 
of which induce us to make some remarks 
upon them. We regret we cannot copy the 
whole, — it is so well written, and shows such a 
relish of pleasure, and sympathy with pain. 
But our limits forbid. 

" An acquaintance," says the writer, " with 
the biography of illustrious musicians proves 
that they reason incorrectly, and with a short 
sight, who eternally talk of having the path of 
genius smoothed, and of setting it above cir- 
cumstances ; for the lives of eminent men of 
this class display the most admirable energies 
developed, and the most enthusiastic projects 
brought to bear, purely by the pressure of the 
very annoyances sought to be removed. Pos- 
session of the creative faculty presupposes a 
superiority to adverse circumstances and * low- 
thoughted care ;' and Goldsmith's poet, sitting 
in his garret with a worsted stocking on his 
head, 

Where the Red Lion, staring o'er the way, 
Invites each passing stranger that can pap, 

in spite of bailiffs, writs, debts, duns, and 
milk-scores, the most horrible that even Ho- 
garth imagined, was still a happy fellow. The 
individual Mr. Jones, seated before a delicate 
leg of lamb and a bottle of sherry, is an 
abstraction of the Mr. Jones who owes 
2841. 18s. Ad., and has, as the Dutchmen say, 
nix to pay. Satisfied that he would pay if he 



could, which is all that is necessary to place 
the morale of his character upon high ground, 
he leaves the affairs of the world to right 
themselves, and enjoys the everlasting day- 
rule of the imagination. [How well said is 
this !J — So it was with Fielding, with Gold- 
smith, with Steele, and others honourable in 
literature, and so also with Handel, with 
Mozart, and Weber, in music ; and it is one 
of the kindly recompenses of nature, by which 
she contrives, on the whole, to adjust so equi- 
tably the good and the evil in this life, that 
where injury to the individual arises from an 
excess of sympathy with the mass, that injury 
is commonly but lightly felt." 

We were not aware that the trials of these 
musicians in pecuniary affairs were so great. 
The following information respecting Mozart 
is as startling as it is affecting : — " Who thinks, 
when he looks over the six great operas of 
Mozart, and admires the Shakspearian know- 
ledge of character, and the thoughtful discri- 
mination appearing in every movement of them, 
that those master-pieces were produced amidst 
a tumult of arrests, and of the lowest annoy- 
ances that ever embroiled a life ? Nay, it is 
even said that the family of Mozart at times 
wanted common necessaries. Adversity may 
have been a sharp thorn in the side of so gentle 
and enjoying a spirit as Mozart ; but it would 
be affectation to deplore the circumstances 
that have put the musical world in possession 
of their most valued treasures." — And here 
follows something awful respecting Handel, — 
an awful man. The hurried dashes and dative 
cases of the writer ( — "to his quarrel with 
Senesino" — "to his madness and rage" — "to 
his palsy" — ) are like an agitato accompani- 
ment to the facts. "The twenty or thirty 
folio volumes bearing the names of Handel's 
oratorios, which alone transmit his name to 
posterity, when we contemplate them in some 
well-ordered library, carry no thought of their 
having been produced after the composer had 
received the first signal of death in a stroke of 
palsy which disabled his arm. Ruin and dis- 
ease, that fill the minds of men of more feeble 
powers with thoughts of the narrow coffin and 
the shroud, made Handel immortal. We owe 
the c Messiah' and 'Israel in Egypt' to the 
composer's obstinate temper — to his quarrel 
with Senesino and the nobility — to his making 
rash engagements with singers that compelled 
him to withdraw his last guinea from the funds 
to satisfy them — to his madness and rage— to 
his palsy — to his proceeding to the vapour- 
baths of Aix-la-Chapelle, whence, with the 
purgation of his humours, reason and religion 
returned, and persuaded him that there was 
another style of music yet untried, more likely 
than operas to suit the grave character of the 
English. Then followed in rapid succession 
his immortal oratorios, works in which the 
pure flame of his genius never shone more 



64 



THE FORTUNES OF GENIUS. 



brightly, though produced at a late period of 
life, commenced after the attack of a threaten- 
ing and fatal disorder, and ended in total 
blindness. " 

The question thus opened by the writer in 
the 'Atlas' is a great puzzle. We confess 
that in many respects we take the same view 
of it as himself ; for we reverence the past ; 
we are inclined to think best of whatever has 
taken place, since it has taken place, — to con- 
clude that good and evil somehow have ad- 
justed themselves in the best manner ; and we 
have such belief in the predominance of happy 
over unhappy feelings in the minds of men of 
genius, that we sometimes think they would 
have had an unfair portion of joy in their life, 
had their lot been less counterbalanced by 
difficulties, ill-health, or whatsoever their 
troubles may have been. 

But the question branches off into some 
others, which it may not be well for society to 
lose sight of ; especially as by the efforts which 
Providence incites them to make for the com- 
mon good, it would seem, that however neces- 
sary some portion of evil may always be for 
the proper relish of good, there may not al- 
ways exist a necessity for it to an amount so 
large. One of these collateral questions we 
shall put. 

Is it certain that the men of genius above- 
mentioned would not have written as much, 
or as finely, under happier circumstances ? 

It is natural enough to conclude, that men 
so careless in worldly matters as Steele and 
Fielding, and with such a relish of the moment 
before them, when it contained the least drop 
of sweet, would perhaps have written nothing 
at all. Frightful supposition ! And yet is the 
supposition likely, considering that very re- 
lish ? Is it natural for people to be delighted, 
and hold their tongue ? To have fame at their 
command, and not command it ? Or was it ne- 
cessary for Handel to be so extremely pained, 
before he could give us his sense of the pas- 
sionate and the sublime ? Was there not suf- 
fering enough for him, short of rage and mad- 
ness ? No firmament over his head, nor graves 
under his feet ? Perhaps he yet needed his af- 
flictions : — be it so, since they have happened ; 
— but might it not be perilous in future, seeing 
that we have become alive to such questions, 
to run the risk of steeling the hearts of people 
against the struggles of genius, if not for the 
latter's sake, yet for their own, and ultimately, 
by that process, for both ? Whatsoever hap- 
pens in the world without our being aware of 
it, we take to be one thing ; what otherwise, 
to be another ; and fate and consequence be- 
come modified accordingly. If the pain should 
remain the same after all, we still cannot be 
certain that it is necessary, however it will 
become us to hope so when it be past. The 
peril, meanwhile, is, that we shall be blunting 
our own feelings, and those of genius too. 



Beaumont was of opinion that a man of ge- 
nius could no more help putting his thoughts 
on paper, than a traveller in a burning desert 
can help drinking when he sees water. 

" I know full well, that, no more than the man 
That travels through the burning deserts, can 
When he is beaten with the raging sun, 
Half smother'd in the dust, have power to run 
From a cool river, which himself doth find, 
Ere he be slaked ; no more can he whose mind 
Joys in the Muses, hold from that delight, 
When Nature and his full thoughts bid him write." 

Could Fielding have helped writing ' Tom 
Jones ' (the perfectest prose-fiction in the lan- 
guage) whether he had been in trouble or not ? 
Could Steele have helped throwing his lighter, 
happier graces, round the muse of his friend 
Addison ? Would Goldsmith's craving for 
reputation have allowed him to be silent with 
his pen (which was admirable), when he could 
not even refrain in company with his tongue 
(which was nothing) ? Or does the enjoying 
critic of the ' Atlas,' whose articles are like 
variations upon the musical beauties they cri- 
ticise, dwelling upon them, and winding them 
in congenial tones round his heart, really think 
it would have been possible for Mozart to pos- 
sess all that abundance of the soul of love and 
pleasure, and not cry aloud ? — not burst forth 
and blossom like the peach-trees in spring ? 
not come pouring down from a hundred foun- 
tains of song into the surging sea of the 
orchestra, like the summer clouds from the 
mountains ? 

We grant that certain noble kinds of pain 
may be necessary to produce certain sublimi- 
ties of composition, whether in musical or 
other writing ; but need the composer be 
stimulated with the lowest and most humiliat- 
ing cares, to induce him to write at all, sup- 
posing him to be a real genius ? Perhaps he 
would not write so much ; but are we sure even 
of that, supposing him to be put into a condition 
quite suitable to his nature ? Steele and Fielding 
and Mozart would not have written all the 
identical same works which they produced ; 
but are we sure they would not have produced 
as many, or even better ? Well-fed birds sing 
in cages ; but the more philosophic of their 
jailors (strange people !) discern something in 
the best of their imprisoned songs, inferior to 
their "wood-notes wild." Does the throstle on 
the bough, in order to pour gushes of melody 
from his heart, require a string to his leg, or 
a blink from some bailiff snake ? 

Walter Scott assuredly would not have 
written all his novels, had he not thought cir- 
cumstances required it ; but we should most 
likely have had his best. < Waverley ' he wrote 
for love, when he did not dream that he should 
get a sixpence by it ; and « Old Mortality ' and 
< The Antiquary' soon followed the publication 
of that novel — partly, no doubt, for profit, but 
much also by reason of love encouraged, and 



THE FORTUNES OF GENIUS. 



Go 



out of a love of the sense of power. These, 
his best, we should have had ; and he would 
not have been killed by writing his worst. — 
Oh, Scotland ! Oh, England ! Oh, Europe ! we 
might say, for he belonged to all, — how could 
you suffer him to die ? 

And Burns — that other " glory and shame " 
of this island — he did not get (so to speak) a 
penny for his writings ; for though, no doubt, 
he did get a good deal more, yet that was not 
the reason why he produced them ; and num- 
bers of his songs he gave away. Yes ; he, the 
glorious ploughman and born gentleman, gave 
his songs away, free as the bird that he took 
for his crest. Now Burns, if any man ever 
did, wrote for love, and not for money. Yet 
his life was full of pecuniary distress. 

And observe how many men of genius have 
written abundantly, who have had no sordid 
cares, — certainly none that writing settled for 
them, in a pecuniary sense. Chaucer is an 
illustrious instance. Spenser another — Milton 
(though poor) another — Beaumont and Flet- 
cher, Pope, Swift, Addison, Gibbon, Hume, 
Hooker, Sterne, Lamb, "Wordsworth, Jeremy 
Taylor — in short, almost all our best, and all 
the Greek, Roman, and Italian men of genius 
(for nobody ever got obolus or crazia for his 
writings in the classical countries, ancient or 
modern). In Italy there is no payment of 
authors, any more than there was among the 
countrymen of Anacreon and Ovid ; yet we 
have had, nevertheless, the Dantes, Petrarchs, 
and Ariostos. The Homers, to be sure, got 
their " feed," in the'minstrel times of Greece ; 
but nobody supposes that those amazing rhap- 
sodists would never have opened their mouths 
but for King Alcinous's pork-chops. 

Then, among musicians — Haydn, we believe, 
was not distressed ; nor the Corellis and Paesi- 
ellos. Gluck was rich. Nor have the best of 
the painters been poor, — the Raphaels, Michael 
Angelos, and Titians. On the contrary, with 
the exception of Rembrandt, those who have 
been best off in worldly affairs have generally 
been most abundant in pictorial produce, — 
sometimes, it is true, by help of the influx of 
wealth, as in Titian's case ; but, at any rate, 
necessity was not the stimulant. Nor did 
patronage make them idle. No ; because it 
was true, and lit on true men. The watered 
tree bore, because it possessed the seed. Do 
not Hummel, Spohr, and others, write, and 
write well, though made as comfortable as 
church-canons in those little snug chapel- 
masterships of theirs, of which we are told 
so delightfully in the ' Ramble among the 
Musicians in Germany ? ' 

Often and often, we doubt not — perhaps in 
all instances — has inconsistency of position in 
men of genius been mistaken for idleness. It 
may be possible, in many cases, that tempera- 
ment, or even too much thought, or other 
conflicting impulses, may produce something 



in the appearance, which " the world calls 
idle ; " but the true conflicting impulses, in 
perhaps all instances, have arisen from incom- 
patibility of calls upon the attention. He who 
is forced to do incompatible or uncongenial 
things, does them badly ; or he sings, perhaps, 
at all events, and sings well ; but sometimes 
he cannot sing at all, — the wires of the cage of 
his necessity press too hard upon him — he 
wants breathing-room, nature, comfort ; he 
sings at last, partly because he is forced, partly 
because it solaces him. But try the humane 
expedient of rescuing him from his worst cares, 
and see how he would sing then ; — if not his 
most, yet surely his best. At least, so it 
appears to us. 

Blessings, nevertheless, say we, with the 
genial philosopher of the * Atlas,' upon the 
trouble and sorrow even of a sordid kind, if 
we could not have had certain men of genius 
without them ; and blessings, at all events, 
upon the beauty into which they are converted, 
and the divine way which Nature has of making 
bitterness itself blossom and become medicinal. 
But let us take care how we sow opinions, 
unqualified, the fruits of which may intoxicate 
weak heads in after times — with careless as- 
sumption, if writers — with selfish references 
to Providence and necessity, if the arbiters 
of the fate of writers. Most writers of any 
ability are pretty well off in these times, and 
have a good patron in the public. But a time 
may come, (are we sure that it has in no case 
happened already ?) when, by the very process 
of the abundance of writings, genius may 
want support ; and let us not prepare our chil- 
dren's children to refuse it. 

The absurdity of a tragedy, unfortunately, 
is not always an argument against its chances ; 
but to show how very absurd this principle of 
leaving men of genius to their fate might be- 
come, if driven to all its consequences, let our 
contemporary, who understands and loves a 
joke run to seed (no man better), take the 
following scene between the future patron of 
a musical genius, and an emissary he has 
despatched to inquire into his circumstances. 

Patron. — Well, Dick, and how did you find 
him ? "Will the composition of the new opera 
go on swimmingly ? 

Emissary. — According to your Grace, it will, 
for he is horribly off. 

P.— Good. "What, in pressing want, eh ? 
Can't afford to be idle ? 

E. — If he did, he could not eat. The butcher 
would not trust him. The butcher says he is too 
honest a man to be trusted ; he is such a child. 

P. — Excellent ! just like your man of genius. 
And the butcher is a shrewd dog. But our 
new Mozart must not starve quite ; we'll take 
care of that. Then he has finished, I presume, 
that capital scene of the feast, with that won- 
derful joyous dance ? and that droll chorus, 
with the corpulent man in it ? 

F 



66 



POETS' HOUSES. 



E. — He has ; with a lawyer's letter on each 
side of him, and a face haggard with head- 
ache. 

P. (rubbing his hands.) — Capital ! We are 
sure then, you think, of the whole opera ? 

E. — There is no doubt of it. His five chil- 
dren were looking out of the window, wonder- 
ing whether the baker would come. 

P. — You rejoice me. We shall have a bril- 
liant audience. And what did he say to you ? 

E. — Oh ! he smiled, as usual, and laughed, 
and said he wondered at his spirits, considering 
his headach ; but I thought I almost saw the 
tears in his eyes, as he said it. 

P.— A true genius ! That's the way he gets 
his pathos, Dick. The man is all fire and 
feeling. 

E. — I suspect he would have been glad of a 
little more "fire" yesterday, for his servant 
told me he had no coals. 

P.— Bravo ! Poor fellow ! Oh, it's clear we 
shall do capitally. We must not let his fingers 
be cold, however, nor the baker fail his chil- 
dren. 

E. — Did your Grace ever think of trying 
what a course of comfort would do for him ? 

P. — A course of luhat ? Ruin, Dick, ruin. I 
never did, of course ; but who'd write if they 
could help it ? 

E. (aside.) — Not you, God knows ; for it's 
as much as you can do to spell. Yet this is 
the great opera patron whom our " new Mo- 
zart" calls a "good kind of man, not over 
imaginative ! " 



LXI.— POETS' HOUSES. 

A paper in Mr. Disraeli's ' Curiosities of 
Literature' upon 'Literary Residences,' is 
very amusing and curious ; but it begins with 
a mistake in saying that " men of genius have 
usually been condemned to compose their 
finest works, which are usually their earliest 
ones, under the roof of a garret ;" and the 
author seems to think, that few have realized 
the sort of house they wished to live in. The 
combination of "genius and a garret" is an 
old joke, but little more. Genius has been 
often poor enough, but seldom so much so as 
to want what are looked upon as the decencies 
of life. In point of abode, in particular, we 
take it to have been generally lucky as to the 
fact, and not at all so grand in the desire as 
Mr. Disraeli seems to imagine. Ariosto, who 
raised such fine structures in his poetry, was 
asked indeed how he came to have no greater 
one when he built a house for himself; and he 
answered, that " palaces are easier built with 
words than stones." It was a pleasant answer, 
and fit for the interrogator ; but Ariosto va- 
lued himself much upon the snug little abode 
which he did build, as may be seen by the in- 



scription still remaining upon it at Ferrara * ; 
and we will venture to say for the cordial, 
tranquillity-loving poet, that he would rather 
live in such a house as that, and amuse him- 
self with building palaces in his poetry, than 
have undergone the fatigue, and drawn upon 
himself the publicity, of erecting a princely 
mansion, full of gold and marble. No man- 
sion which he could have built would have 
equalled what he could fancy ; and poets love 
nests from which they can take their flights — 
not worlds of wood and stone to strut in, and 
give them a sensation. If so, they would have 
set their wits to get rich, and live accordingly ; 
which none of them ever did yet, — at any rate, 
not the greatest. Ariosto notoriously neg- 
lected his "fortunes" — in that sense of the 
word. Shakspeare had the felicity of building 
a house for himself, and settling in his native 
town ; but though the best in it, it was nothing 
equal to the "seats" outside of it (where the 
richer men of the district lived) ; and it ap- 
pears to have been a " modest mansion," not 
bigger, for instance, than a good-sized house 
in Red Lion-street, or some other old quarter 
in the metropolis. Suppose he had set Ids great 
wits to rise in the state and accumulate money, 
like Lionel Cranfield, for example, or Thomas 
Cromwell, the blacksmith's son. We know 
that any man who chooses to begin systemati- 
cally with a penny, under circumstances at all 
favourable, may end with thousands. Suppose 
Shakspeare had done it ; he might have built 
a house like a mountain. But he did not, — it 
will be said, — because he was a poet, and poets 
are not getters of money. Well ; and for the 
same reason, poets do not care for the mightiest 
things which money can get. It cannot [get 
them health, and freedom, and a life in the 
green fields, and mansions in fairy-land ; and 
they prefer those, and a modest visible 
lodging. 

Chaucer had a great large house to live in, — 
a castle, — because he was connected with 
royalty ; but he does not delight to talk of 
such places : he is all for the garden, and the 
daisied fields, and a bower like a " pretty par- 
lour." His mind was too big for a great house ; 
which challenges measurement with its in- 
mates, and is generally equal to them. He 
felt elbow-room, and heart-room, only out in 
God's air, or in the heart itself, or in the 
bowers built by Nature, and reminding him of 
the greatness of her love. 

Spenser lived at one time in a castle, — in 
Ireland, — a piece of forfeited property, given 
him for political services ; and he lived to re- 
pent it : for it was burnt in civil warfare, and 
his poor child burnt with it ; and the poet was 
driven back to England, broken-hearted. But 

* See an engraving of the house itself, with its inscrip- 
tion, in the * Gallery of Portraits,' No. XXVIII., Article 
— ' Ariosto.' But it wants the garden-ground which be- 
longed to it. 



POETS' HOUSES. 



C7 



look at the houses he describes in his poems, 
— even he who was bred in a court, and loved 
pomp, after his fashion. He bestows the great 
ones upon princes and allegorical personages, 
who live in state and have many servants, (for 
the largest houses, after all, are but collections 
of small ones, and of unfitting neighbourhoods 
too) ; but his nests, his poetic bowers, his de- 
llclce and amcenitates, he keeps for his hermits 
and his favourite nymphs, and his flowers of 
courtesy ; and observe how he delights to re- 
peat the word " little," when describing them. 
His travellers come to "little valleys," in 
which, through the tree-tops, comes reeking 
up a "little smoke," (a "chearefull signe," 
quoth the poet,) and 

" To Utile cots in which the shepherds lie ;" 

and though all his little cots are not happy, 
yet he is ever happiest when describing them, 
should they be so, and showing in what sort 
of contentment his mind delighted finally to 
rest. 

" A little lowly heritage it was 

Down in a dale, hard by a forest's side, 
Far from resort of people, that did pass 
In travel to and fro. A little wide 
There was an holy chappell edifyde, 
"Wherein the hermit dewly wont to say 
His holy things each morn and eventide ; 
Thereby a crystall streame did gently play, 
Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alway. 

Arrived there, the little house they fill, 
Nor look for entertainment where none was ; 
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will ; 
The noblest mind the best contentment has." 

Milton, who built the Pandemonium, and 
filled it with 

" A thousand demi-gods on golden seats," 

was content if he could but get a "garden- 
house " to live in, as it was called in his time ; 
that is to say, a small house in the suburbs, 
with a bit of garden to it. He required no- 
thing but a tree or two about him, to give him 
"airs of Paradise." His biographer shows 
us, that he made a point of having a residence 
of this kind. He lived as near as he could to 
the wood-side and the fields, like his fellow- 
patriot, M. Beranger, who would have been 
the Andrew Marvell of those times, and 
adorned his great friend as the other did, or 
like his Mirth (F Allegro) visiting his Melan- 
choly. 

And hear beloved Cowley, quiet and plea- 
sant as the sound in his trees : — " I never had 
any other desire so strong, and so like to co- 
vetousness, as that one which I have had 
always, — that I might be master at last of a 
small house and large garden, with very mo- 
derate conveniences joined to them, and there 
dedicate the remainder of my life only to the 
culture of them, and study of nature ; and 
there, with no design beyond my wall, 



' whole and entire to lie, 
In no unactive ease, and no unglorious poverty.' " 
The Garden. 

" I confess," says he, in another essay (on 
Greatness), " I love littleness almost in all 
things, — a little convenient estate, a little 
cheerful house, a little company, and a very 
little feast ; and if ever I were to fall in love 
again (which is a great passion, and therefore 
I hope I have done with it), it would be, I 
think, with prettiness, rather than with majes- 
tical beauty." 

(What charming writing! — how charming 
as writing, as well as thinking ! and charming 
in both respects, because it possesses the only 
real perfection of either, — truth of feeling). 

Cowley, to be sure, got such a house as he 
wanted "at last," and was not so happy in it 
as he expected to be ; but then it was because 
he did only get it " at last" when he was grow- 
ing old, and was in bad health. Neither might 
he have ever been so happy in such a place as 
he supposed (blest are the poets, surely, in en- 
joying happiness even in imagination !) yet he 
would have been less comfortable in a house 
less to his taste. 

Dryden lived in a house in Gerrard-street 
(then almost a suburb), looking, at the back, 
into the gardens of Leicester House, the man- 
sion of the Sidneys. Pope had a nest at 
Twickenham, much smaller than the fine 
house since built upon the site ; and Thomson 
another at Bichniond, consisting only of the 
ground-floor of the present house. Everybody 
knows what a rural house Cowper lived in. 
Shenstone's was but a farm adorned, and his 
bad health unfortunately hindered him from 
enjoying it. He married a house and grounds, 
poor man ! instead of a wife ; which was 
being very " one-sided " in his poetry — and 
he found them more expensive than Miss Dol- 
man would have been. He had better have 
taken poor Maria first, and got a few domestic 
cares of a handsome sort, to keep him alive 
and moving. Most of the living poets are 
dwellers in cottages, except Mr. Rogers, who 
is rich, and has a mansion, looking on one of 
the parks ; but there it does look — upon grass 
and trees. He will have as much nature with 
his art as he can get. Next to a cottage of the 
most comfortable order, we should prefer, for 
our parts, if we must have servants and a 
household, one of those good old mansions of 
the Tudor age, or some such place, which 
looks like a sort of cottage-palace, and is full 
of old corners, old seats in the windows, and 
old memories. The servants, in such a case, 
would probably have grown old in one's fa- 
mily, and become friends ; and this makes a 
great difference in the possible comfort of a 
great house. It gives it old family warmth. 



68 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



LXIL— A JOURNEY BY COACH. 

(a fragment.) 

A friend* and myself found ourselves, one 
showery August afternoon, sitting at the White 
Horse in Piccadilly, the sole occupants of the 
inside of an Oxford coach, and keeping such 
grave faces as sickness could help us to, in 
resistance of the almost unbearable tendency 
to laugh, produced by the crowd of fruit- 
sellers, pencil-men, pocket-book thrusters into 
your face, and other urgent philanthropists, 
who cannot conceive it possible how you can 
stir from London, unprovided from their espe- 
cial stocks. 

We confess we have a regard for these men, 
owing to their excessive energy, and the loud- 
ness with which they pursue the interests of 
their wives and families. We stand it out as 
long as we can ; perhaps buy nothing, — out of 
a secret admiration of what we seem to be dis- 
liking, and a sense of maintaining an honour- 
able contest, — they with their tongues, and we 
with our faces, which we keep fixed on some 
object foreign to the matter in hand (the only 
way), and pretend to hold in a state of indif- 
ference, from which there is no hope. If we 
buy nothing, our conscience absolutely twinges 
us ; and yet how could we more honourably 
treat an honourable enemy ? He clearly thinks 
it a matter of vigour and perseverance, — a 
regular battle : we take him at his word, and 
won't at all purchase. His object is to thrust 
his oranges into our pockets ; ours, to keep 
our money there ; his, to be loud, importu- 
nate, and successful ; ours, to be still, insipid- 
looking, and of course successful also. We 
respect him so much, that we must needs main- 
tain his respect for ourselves ; and how are we 
to do this if we give in ? He will think us weak 
fellows, — chaps that can't resist ; so we do not 
care twopence for his wife and family, but en- 
trench ourselves in a malignant benevolence 
towards our own. Orangery begins at home. 
But the only sure way is to fix your eyes on 
some other point, and say nothing. It is a 
battle won on your part by an intensity of 
indifference. You must not even look as if 
you disputed. You must fix your eyes on a shop 
window ; or on vacancy ; or on the woman who 
is waiting for her husband ; or the bundle which 
the other is hugging ; or the dog who has just 
had a kick in the mouth, and is licking it with 
sedentary philosophy in a corner, looking at 
the same time about him ; or you may watch the 
gentleman's face who has come half an hour too 
soon, but is afraid to go into a house to wait. If 
you look at your assailants, you only increase 
the vociferation ; if you smile, they think you 
half won ; if you object to the price, it is all 

* The late Mr. Egerton Webbe. Alas ! (that we should 
so soon, and unexpectedly, be forced to say " late ! ") 



over with you. Let your smile be internal, 
and your superiority immense and not to be 
reached. Let them say to themselves, " That 
fellow must be a magistrate, or an inspector 
of police." 

At length, a sudden bustle, and some creak- 
ing evidences on the part of the coach, an- 
nounce that you are about to set off. Trunks 
lumber and " flop" over head ; all the outside 
passengers are seated ; the box and its steps 
feel the weight of the ascending charioteer, as 
the axle-trees of their cars groaned under the 
gods of Homer ; an unknown individual touches 
his hat, informing you that he has " seen to 
the things ;" hasty anxieties are expressed for 
the box— the portmanteau — the carpet-bag ; 
"all's right ;" a kind domestic face is taken 
leave of with a moist eye (don't let any but the 
sick, or the very masculine, know it) ; and off 
we start, rattling with ponderous dance over 
the stones of Piccadilly. 

We have never seen a description of the 
inside of a coach. It is generally too much 
occupied to be thought of, except as a collec- 
tion of fellow-passengers. In the present 
instance we had it all to ourselves, and could 
reconnoitre it — nobody, in summer-time, ever 
thinking, it seems, of going inside, except in 
cases of illness, and then very seldom ; parti- 
cularly if it is a wet night, and the "young 
woman" is to be sent down cheaply to Guinea 
Lodge. A mail-coach, in summer-time, may 
be defined, — a hollow box with people outside 
of it. For upwards of two hundred miles we 
had a series of coaches nearly all to our two 
selves, as if each of them had been a private 
carriage. We lounged in them, we changed 
corners, we put our legs up, and got ac- 
quainted with every part and particle of their 
accommodation. It is a tight kind of half- 
soft, half-hard thing,— is the inside of a coach ; 
more hard than soft ; not quite so convenient 
as it looks ; " more No than Yes," as the Ita- 
lian said. The tight grey drugget looks com- 
pact and not uncomfortable, yet does not invite 
your head-ache to rest against it. The pockets 
seem as if they ought to contain more than 
they do ; the pair of shoes won't go quite in. 
The floor has neither carpet nor straw ; nor is 
it quite even ; and the places to put things in 
under the seat, are apt to baffle your attempts, 
if the things are at all large ; and you do not 
want them for trifles. If you put your gloves, 
or a few books on the seat, in a few minutes 
you find them gone off upon the floor. The 
drugget is occasionally varied with gay co- 
lours ; and the windows are generally good, — 
pulling up and down with facility. In short, 
there is a show of liberality, in which you 
speedily discern a skimping saving, — the same 
spirit which spoils the building of modern 
houses as well as coaches. The old coaches, 
we may be certain, were larger and more ge- 
nerous, though they made less pretension, and 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



CO 



went at a snail's pace in the comparison . We 
like "coaching" it, for our own parts, and 
should have been well content to live upon 
the road, in those patient antiques, instead of 
getting on at the present rate, and being im- 
patient to arrive at some town, where we shall 
perhaps be equally restless. Not that we are 
insensible to the pleasure of driving fast. We 
like that too : it stirs the blood, and gives a 
sense of power ; but everything is a little too 
smug and hasty at present, and business-like, 
as though we were to be eternally getting on, 
and never realizing anything but fidget and 
money, — the means instead of the end. We 
are truly in a state of transition, — of currency, 
rather : and thank Heaven, we are, and that 
it is transition only. Heaven forefend that 
the good planet should stop where it is, — at a 
Manchester millennium ! 

And we cannot take thoroughly to the 
modern, and we hope, transitory coachman, 
compared with the humbler pretensions of his 
predecessor. We acknowledge his improve- 
ment in some respects. He wears gloves ; has 
cleaner linen, and an opinion of himself ; and 
is called " Sir" by the ostlers. He gathers the 
reins in his hands Avith a sort of half-gentility, 
— a certain retinence and composure of bear- 
ing ; and gives answers in the style of a man 
who is not to be too much troubled, — a part- 
proprietor, — or, for aught we know, corn- 
chandler, and cousin to Squire Jenks himself, 
who in less knowing times was called Farmer 
Jenks. He knows what belongs to the Diffu- 
sion of Coaches. You doubt, notwithstanding 
his red face, whether he could ever get in a 
passion and swear ; till somebody bringing his 
authority into question, out comes the long- 
suppressed, natural, gin-drinking man of many 
weathers. Peace be to him, poor fellow ! and 
a fit of illness that shall stop his drinking in 
time. 

After all, however, our coach was a very 
good coach, and the coachmen as good also — 
for aught that we recollect to the contrary. 
We are painting from the race in general. — 
We had the inside, as we said before, all to 
ourselves ; we had books, rapidity, fresh air, 
and one another's company. Good-natured 
Cowley was with us, in the shape of his de- 
lightful volume of Essays ; Parnell, Shenstone, 
and others, not taxing the faculties over- 
much, but good, chatting, inn-loving men ; 
some Shakspeare, fit for all places, especially 
for one to which we were bound ; a bit of 
Greek Anthology ; some extracts from Black- 
wood, Fraser, Tait, and the New Monthly, 
chiefly consisting of delightful chat upon poets 
(of which more by and by) ; and a curious 
volume, little known, of miscellaneous prose 
by Armstrong, in which one of the best-natured 
men that ever lived, appears to be one of the 
most caustic and querulous. 

All these books and papers kept sliding 



every now and then from the seats, and set us 
laughing. The air was delightfully fresh and 
moist ; the bits of black earth, spun up by the 
coach-wheels, danced merrily by the windows. 
We passed Hyde Park Corner, famous for 
Pope's going to school ; Knightsbridge, where 
Steele made Savage write the pamphlet that 
was to pay for their dinner ; and are come in 
sight of Kensington, and Mrs. Inchbald's 
privacy, — a public-house. 

But we must here give the reader breath, — 
requesting his company with us next week. 



LXIII.— A JOURNEY BY COACH. 

CONTINUED. 

" Life has few things better than this," said 
Dr. Johnson, on feeling himself settled in a 
coach, and rolling along the road. 

" The pleasure, is complete, sir," said Bos- 
well ; thinking to echo the sentiment of his 
illustrious friend, and leave no doubt about 
it. 

" Why, no, sir," returned the Doctor, who 
did not choose to be too much agreed with, 
Bosicellically : — " you have to arrive some- 
where ; — there is to be an end of the pleasure. 
Sir, you have a melancholy anticipation." 

We quote from memory, — probably with little 
justice to what was really said ; but such was 
the gist of it. We confess we did not think 
with Johnson in the present instance ; for the 
friends we had left behind us, and the friends 
we were going to see, are both better things to 
live with, than the fact of being on the road ; 
and our health was not good enough to render 
the intermediate state of existence a perfect 
one. But where the circumstances are all 
favourable, or the change merely good for its 
own sake, we do thoroughly hold with the 
doctor, that few things in life are better than 
rolling along in a coach at your ease, looking 
out upon novelty, and feeling lord of your 
place and time. And as to the melancholy of 
arriving somewhere, it has often struck us how 
unwise it is, in people not bound upon any 
journey's end more attractive than ordinary, 
to be in so much haste to reach there. People 
must exist somewhere ; and where better (except 
with dear friends) than in the midst of scenes 
of nature, in fresh air, and in any easy state of 
movement ? To be borne along, with no trou- 
ble, and yet without compulsion or mere 
passiveness, and with a sense of the power of 
commanding what you enjoy, is surely a 
pleasurable state of being, both for body and 
mind. Let the reader nestle himself up in a 
corner of the coach, with his arms folded, and 
thorough room for his legs, — and fancy it. 
Perhaps he shuts his eyes, and a balmy air 



70 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



comes breathiug on the lids, while his body is 
carried jovially along— jolted a little, occa- 
sionally, without jolting, — Avafted over the fine 
English roads, now dashing at the hill, now 
going gentlier down it; spinning along a per- 
fect level, or gently dipping into a bit of an 
undulation, and so up again, just enough to 
bend his chin a little closer, and remind him 
how smoothly the carriage is hung. 

Verily an English stage coach is a fine thing, 
and they do not " order these matters better in 
France." What we miss of our lively neigh- 
bours, when the coach has strangers in it, is 
their sociability ; but when a couple of friends 
have the inside to themselves, as was the case 
in our instance, what more can be desired? 
No wonder the Spanish gentleman, when he 
saw such an equipage at his door, with its 
handsome horses instead of mules, its compact 
and comfortable self, its nice leather reins (not 
ropes, as they have in the south), its respectful 
and respectable coachman, and the royal arms 
to boot on the panels, thought he had been 
provided by Government with the carriage of 
one of its nobles ; and found it especially diffi- 
cult to be convinced to the contrary, when he 
was seated in all its luxury, and smoothly 
scudding for London at the rate of ten miles 
an hour. 

But to resume our setting out. — Since writ- 
ing our last, we had reason to believe that we 
had been misinformed respecting the site of 
Mrs. Inchbald's sequestered retirement, the 
public-house ; and, on consulting her Memoirs 
by Mr. Boaden, we find that it was in the 
other Kensington road, — the one from Oxford 
street,— at No. 1, St. George's Terrace, near the 
chapel where Sterne lies. "We have been told, 
that somebody asking her how she came to 
lodge at a public-house, she said, with great 
apparent simplicity, perhaps to mystify the 
inquirer, "They had very good beer there." 
We take this opportunity of observing, that 
when we speak jestingly of this abode, we do 
it out of no disrespect to the memory of this 
excellent woman and admirable writer. She 
was an original in conduct as well as in writ- 
ing, but all in a true and superior, not affected 
or mean spirit. She lived at a public-house 
because it was cheap, and had a good prospect ; 
and she lived cheaply, because she gave her 
money away to poor friends and relations. 
She would pass a winter without a fire, the 
want of which she sometimes felt so as to 
make her " cry with cold," in order to be 
able to afford one to an ailing sister. O 
true Christian, and noble creature ! Thy 
love of superiority was full of heart ! An- 
gels, if angels could suffer, might so suffer 
for us, and be above us ; and what was 
wanting in our pity, we should supply with 
love. 

Luckily we do not lose sight of Mrs. Inch- 
bald on this road. If her public-house was 



not where we supposed it, her last lodging- 
houses were at Kensington, and her last home, 
on this side heaven. But we shall come there 
presently. 

We have passed Knightsbridge, once a ter- 
rible lonely place, of cut-throat reputation — 
and the " Cannon Brewery " (which an accom- 
plished Spanish acquaintance of ours, on his 
coming into England, noted in his pocket- 
book, as presenting a curious specimen of 
English parlance, supposing that the casting 
of cannon was called brewing them), and the 
barracks, where tall dragoons are seen dis- 
coursing with little women ; and have come 
into Kensington Gore, with Hyde Park 
again. 

Hyde Park is associated with the reviews 
and the duels of latter generations ; Kensing- 
ton Gardens, with their Court beauties and 
Sunday visiters ; and the palace and suburb, 
with the Court itself, or some connexion of 
royalty, and with Court wits and others. Gray 
came here to try to get rid of his last sickness ; 
and here Arbuthnot, lodged at one time, and 
Swift. 

We have been thinking of Courts and gay 
gardens, and had forgotten the church and its 
graves ; and a shadow suddenly falls upon us 
in approaching it, reminding us of a melan- 
choly portion of one of the most painful parts 
of our life. But a small angel sits smiling at 
us through it, with eyes earnest beyond its 
infancy ; and we are rebuked by its better 
knowledge, and resume our patience, willingly 
admitting a new relief that has been lately 
afforded us, by learning that Mrs. Inchbald 
lies in the same spot. It seems as if any kind 
of innocence both received and imparted a 
grace, from its juxta-position with such a 
woman. For her genius and fame are, of 
course, not what we are thinking of on the 
occasion ; it is the fitness of the greater angel 
for sleeping by the side of the less. Mrs. 
Inchbald was very fond of Kensington. She 
resided there, or in the neighbourhood, during 
the last ten or twelve years of her life ; first 
at Turnham-green ; then in St. George's-row 
(as above mentioned) ; then at No. 4, Earl's- 
place, opposite Holland House ; then in Leo- 
nard's-place ; then in Sloane-street (at No. 
148) ; and, lastly, in Kensington House, a 
Catholic boarding-establishment, where she 
died. She was fond of Kensington for its 
healthiness, its retirement, its trees and pro- 
spects, its Catholic accommodations (for she 
was a liberal believer of that church)— but not 
least, we suspect, for a reason which Mr. 
Boaden's interesting biography has not men- 
tioned — namely, the interment in Kensington 
church-yard, of the eminent physician, Dr. 
Warren, for whom, in her thirty-eighth year, 
and in the twelfth year of a widowhood graced 
by genius, beauty, and refusals of other mar- 
riages, she entertained a secret affection, so 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



71 



young and genuine, that she would walk up 
and down Sackville-street, where he lived, 
purely to get a glimpse of the light in his 
window. Her heart was so excellent, and 
accustomed to live on aspirations so noble, 
that we have not the least doubt this was 
one of her great ties to Kensington, and 
that she looked forward, with something 
of an angelical delight to the hour when 
she should repose in the earth, near the 
friend whose abode she could not partake 
while living. 

We beg the reader to pardon a digression 
longer than we shall usually indulge in, for 
the sake of the feelings of gratitude and ad- 
miration just re-excited in us by a perusal of 
the life of this extraordinary woman, the 
authoress of some of the most amusing comedy 
and pathetic narrative in the language : a 
reformer, abhorring violence ; a candid con- 
fessor of her own faults, not in a pick-thank 
and deprecating style, but honest and heart- 
felt (for they hurt her craving for sympa- 
thy) ; an admirable kinswoman and friend 
nevertheless, — most admirable, as we have 
just seen ; the creator of the characters of 
"Dorriforth" and "Miss Milman ;" and the 
writer of a book (' Nature and Art') which 
a woman, worthy to have been her friend, 
put during his childhood into the hands 
of the writer of these j)ages : to the no 
small influence, he believes, of opinions which 
he afterwards aspired to advocate, however 
imperfectly he may have proved his right to 
do so. 

Dr. Warren, a man as good as he was intel- 
ligent, is in the recollection of many. We 
have heard, from a lady who remembers him, 
that he was a very gentlemanly man, with all 
the wise suavity of the genuine physician — 
not of a healthy complexion, but with very 
fine eyes. And we learn from another, that 
his searching and refined look, his professional 
skill, his power to attach affection, and, alas ! 
his delicacy of health, are hereditary in the 
name. 

Truly, love keeps one a long while lingering 
at the door ; and we shall never get on with 
our journey at this rate. 

We must begin again next week, and move 
faster! 



LXIV.— A JOURNEY BY COACH. 

CONTINUED. 

Holland House and its memories — Formal new buildings 
in the roads near London — New public-houses inferior to 
the old ones — Hammersmith and its legend, &c. — Turn- 
ham Green — Passages from Gay and the ' Mayor of Gar- 
rat'--— Brentford — Cavaliers and Puritans— Sion House — 
Osterley Park — A halt at an Inn-door. 



The traveller, in passing Holland House, 
must try to get as long a glimpse of it as he 
can ; and if he has any fancy, and is a reader, 
the old house will glow to him like a painted 
window. Visions of wits and beauties will 
flash upon his eyes, from the times of Eliza- 
beth and James the First, down to this present 
November 1835, — with more, we trust, to 
come. Perhaps there has not been a set of 
men, eminent in their day, who, for the most 
part, have not visited at that house. It was 
built by the Cope family in 1G07 ; then pos- 
sessed by the Earl of Holland, one of the fa- 
vourites of Charles the First's wife, Henrietta 
Maria ; then by the Commonwealth, whose 
General, Fairfax, made it his head-quarters on 
one occasion ; then by the Holland family 
again, through whom, by his marriage with the 
Countess of Warwick and Holland, it became 
the residence of Addison, who died there ; 
then by a descendant of the family, who sold 
it to Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, and 
it has since remained in the possession of his 
successors. Here Charles Fox spent his child- 
hood with a good-natured father, who helped 
him to remain something of a child all his life, 
— the luckiest thing that can happen to a great 
man. Here, in all probability, visited the 
Sucklings and Lady Carlisles, of the time of 
Charles the First ; — here the Buckinghams of 
the two Charleses, with all the wits of those 
days ; — here certainly, Steele and his fellow 
associates of Addison ; — here Walpole, and 
Hanbury Williams, and the beauties of the 
Richmond and other families ; — here the Jef- 
freys, Burkes and Sheridans ; — and here the 
Broughams, Byrons, Rogerses, Campbells, 
Thomas Moores, and all the other Whig ge- 
nius of the present age, attracted by the con- 
genial abilities and the flowing hospitality of 
the biographer of Lope de "Vega, — a true ne- 
phew of Charles Fox, — a nobleman gracing, 
and helping to secure his order, because he 
sympathises with all ranks. We never pass 
Holland House (and we pass it often, and often 
look up at it from its gate) without wishing a 
blessing and long life to the man, whose pos- 
session of so fair a place it is not in the nature 
of the poorest honest man to grudge him*. 

And the house is worth looking at, too, for 
its own sake. It is a curious specimen of the 



* While revising this sheet for the press, we have to 
lament the death of this most genial and excellent man, the 
delight of all who knew him, and the friend of the world. 



72 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



style of architecture in the reign of Elizabeth 
and James ; and, to our feelings, not less com- 
fortable-looking than curious — for it gives one 
the idea of a multitude of snug, straggling 
rooms, situated in all sorts of corners and stair- 
cases ; and there is a noble library, be sure ; 
besides plenty of family and other pictures. 

Adieu to snug, old, picturesque Holland 
House, with its hundred visions from the win- 
dows ; for we must push on. The worst of the 
roads near London is, that for a long while 
you seem to be neither in London nor in the 
country. You think you have got into the 
latter, when some long formal row of houses, 
some " Prospect Place," or " Paradise Row," 
— or, worse than that, some spick and span 
new, yellow-brick set, convinces you to the 
contrary ; and the Paradise Row perhaps has 
no gardens, and the Prospect Place no pro- 
spect. Paradise Row was doubtless Paradise 
once ; but the Adam and Eve have been driven 
out by the taste of bricklaying ; and Prospect 
Plac e had a " view," till " Smith's Terrace," or 
some such interloper, came sidling in front of it 
with forty new tenements, and impudently de- 
prived it of the beatific vision of its coAV-field. 

What we particularly hate in the new build- 
ings about London, is the re-built or furbished- 
up public-houses. They think themselves very 
fine, with their new, flat faces, and their golden 
letters on blue grounds ; and the people have 
doubtless got a lift in the world, and are 
mighty " respectable-like, " and serious, and 
disagreeable ; or else, they are at their wit's 
end to pay for the finery, and drink and swear 
worse than Tom Dykes over the way, whose 
wife died a month after she had had a battle 
with him. Perhaps, to mend the matter, they 
cut down the tree in front. The place then 
becomes all as flat as need be, and worth no- 
body's looking at, except a bricklayer's. No- 
body wishes to stop at it except the mere 
drinker, or the mere man of business ; and he 
is for getting on as fast as possible, as he well 
may ; for what is the use of his stopping any- 
where ? For our parts, give us the good, old, 
snug, picturesque public-house, which had, and 
in remoter places still has, the great tree be- 
fore it, with a bench, and the old swinging 
sign, that sings or creaks in the winds on win- 
ter-nights, and the landlord, not above nor 
below his respectable calling, — hearty as the 
punch-bowl in his window, and clean as his 
sanded floor. We have touched upon the in- 
terior of such a house in the first article of our 
journey ; and we never pass its outside without 
thinking what a picture it makes, and how 
well it would look in a picture. But what has 
the " Jolly Gardener," or the " Shepherd and 
Shepherdess," or the "Bull," or " Robin 
Hood," or the "Hand and Flower," or the 
" Angel," or the " Maiden's Head," to do with 
a great, flat-faced, commercial, dusty road, and 
rows of new houses ? May a devil's blessing 



(as the philanthropist said) light on those who 
do not endeavour (like proper reformers, as 
we are) to bring the new beautifully out of the 
old, and thus to retain what is good, while 
they are making things better ! 

But we are anticipating, for we are not to 
halt yet ; we have not got far enough. We 
pass the lane turning to Acton, on the right 
hand, and to Fulham on the left, and are in 
Hammersmith, famous for its ghost, and its 
suspension bridge, and the abode of Richard- 
son. Here is also a convent of Nuns, a rare 
sight in England, especially so near the metro- 
polis. They are of the order of Benedictines ; 
nay, we believe, of the branch of Visitandines, 
— the same that were so scandalized at the 
worldly knowledge of their famous parrot, Vert- 
Vert, yet could not find it in their good hearts 
to detest him. (See (Euvres de Gresset, or the 
translations in various collections of poetry, — 
or in i Fraser's Magazine' a few months back.) 
We have met with a legend somewhere, re- 
specting the origin of the name of Hammer- 
smith which relates, that two gigantic sisters 
residing there built the churches at Putney 
and Fulham, and that they threw over to one 
another, as they wanted it, across the river, a 
stupendous hammer. It is a pity when a name 
of obvious solution puts an end even to the 
most improbable fiction. Hammersmith was 
evidently the abode of some country black- 
smith in old time, and probably consisted of 
this solitary shop, the first that was met with 
on the high-road going from London. 

The person, whoever he was, that played 
the part of a ghost in this village some years 
back, and was the occasion of an innocent 
man's being shot, has probably repented of his 
foolish prank. The length and bitterness of 
his regret, by this time, will have earned him 
a right to forgive himself. 

We have mentioned that Mrs. Inchbald once 
resided at Turnham Green, the next place 
from Hammersmith. It is famous for the 
blunder attributed to Goldsmith about the bad 
peas. He had heard the joke about taking 
them from Hammersmith " to turn 'em green ;" 
and is said, in repeating it, to have substituted 
the words " make 'em green'''' for " turn 'em" On 
coming from Kensington, you catch views of 
Harrow on the Hill, where Garth lies ; and 
betwixt Hammersmith and Brentford, you 
look on the right towards Acton, where Lady 
Wortley Montagu lived, and Ealing, where 
her cousin Fielding once resided. Gay has 
mentioned this road, in his epistle to the Earl 
of Burlington, entitled a ' Journey to Exeter.' 

" While you, my lord, bid stately piles ascend, 
(Burlington House, in Piccadilly, which we 
have passed, was one of his building) 

Or in your Chiswick bowers enjoy your friend, 
(Chiswick lies a mile out of the road to the 
left, as you enter Turnham Green) 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



73 



Where Pope unloads the houghs within his reach, 
The purple vine, blue plum, and blushing peach, 
I journey far. — You knew fat bards might tire, 
And, mounted, sent me forth, your trusty squire. 

'Twas on the day when city dames repair 
To take their weekly dose of Hyde Park air, 
When forth we trot : no carts the road infest, 
For still on Sundays country horses rest. 

(Except when they are used for chaises and 
other vehicles.) 

Thy gardens, Kensington, we leave unseen, 
Through Hammersmith jog on to Turnham Green ; 
That Turnham Green, which dainty pigeons fed, 
But feeds no more ; for Solomon is dead ; 

(Solomon was a breeder of pigeons ;) 

Three dusty miles reach Brentford's tedious town, 
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known." 

But Foote has blown the finest mock- 
heroical trumpet in celebration of this district, 
in his famous banter upon the city-militia. 
The passage is very ludicrous ; so the reader 
shall have it as he goes in his coach : for be- 
sides those who at present accompany our- 
selves, we hope these papers may be taken 
with them by some other readers by and by, 
who happen to go the same road. 

"Sir Jacob. Well, Major, our wars are 
done ; the rattling drum and squeaking fife now 
wound our ears no more. 

Major Sturgeon. True, Sir Jacob ; our corps 
is disembodied ; so the French may sleep in 
security. 

Sir J. But, Major, was it not rather late in 
life for you to enter upon the profession of 
arms ? 

Major S. A little awkward in the beginning, 
Sir Jacob : the great difficulty they had was to 
get me to turn out my toes : but use, use re- 
conciles all them kind of things : why, after 
my first campaign, I no more minded the noise 
of the guns than a flea-bite. 

Sir J. No ! 

Major S. No. There is more made of these 
matters than they merit. For the general 
good, indeed, I am glad of the peace ; but as 
to my single self, — and yet we have had some 
desperate duty, Sir Jacob. 

Sir J. No doubt. 

Major S. Oh ! such marchings and counter- 
marchings, from Brentford to Ealing, from 
Ealing to Acton, from Acton to Uxbridge ; the 
dust flying — sun scorching — men sweating ! — 
Why there was our last expedition to Houns- 
low ; that day's work carried off Major 
Molasses. Bunhill-fields never saw a braver 
commander. He was an irreparable loss to 
the service 

Sir J. How came that about ? 

Major S. Why, it was partly the Major's own 
fault ; I advised him to pull off his spurs be- 
fore he went upon action ; but he was resolute, 
and would not be ruled. 

Sir J. Spirit ; zeal for the service. 



Major S. Doubtless. But to proceed : in 
order to get our men in good spirits, we were 
quartered at Thistleworth the evening before. 
At day-break, our regiment formed at Houns- 
low town's end, as it might be about here. 
The major made a fine disposition : on we 
marched, the men all in high spirits, to attack 
the gibbet where Gardel is hanging ; but turn- 
ing down a narrow lane to the left, as it might 
be about there, in order to possess a pig-sty, 
that we might take the gallows in flank, and, 
at all events, secure a retreat, who should 
come by but a drove of fat oxen from Smith- 
field ! The drums beat in the front, the dogs 
barked in the rear, the oxen set up a gallop ; 
on they came thundering upon us, broke 
through our ranks in an instant, and threw 
the whole corps into confusion. 

Sir J. Terrible ! 

Major S. The major's horse took to his 
heels ; away he scoured o'er the heath. That 
gallant commander stuck both his spurs into 
his flank, and, for some time, held by his 
mane ; but in crossing a ditch, the horse threw 
up his head, gave the major a douse in the 
chops, and plumped him into a gravel-pit, just 
by the powder-mills. 

Sir J. Dreadful ! 

Major S. Whether from the fall or the fright, 
the major moved off in a month. Indeed, it 
was an unfortunate day for us all. 

Sir J. As how ? 

Major S. Why, as Captain Cucumber, Lieut. 
Pattypan, Ensign Tripe, and myself, were re- 
turning to town in the Turnham Green stage, 
we were stopped near the Hammersmith turn- 
pike, and robbed and stripped by a single foot- 
pad." 

This is very laughable ; but whatever may 
be the airs occasionally given themselves by 
civic heroes, their actual service in the field 
has proved itself to be no joke ; as poor Charles 
the First found to his cost, and in this very 
spot. In an encounter with the London forces, 
Prince Rupert left 800 cavaliers dead upon 
Turnham Green ; and in the subsequent en- 
gagement at Brentford, the same gentlemen, 
according to a pamphlet issued by the 
Puritans, said " God damn them ! the devil 
was in their powder."* We are the more 
willing to vindicate the dignity of these our 
warlike suburbs, because, to "own the soft 
impeachment," we "ourself," when time was, 
have been a gallant volunteer, doing dreadful 
"field-day" in the same neighbourhood, and 
tearing loaves out of bakers' baskets, and spig- 
gots out of the barrels in beer-cellars, in the 



* " A true relation of the battail at Brentford, the 12th 
of November, between his Majesty's army and the Parlia- 
ment army ; and how the cavaliers swore God damn them, 
the devil was in their powder." Title of a pamphlet in 
the British Museum, mentioned by Lysons, in his " En- 
virons of London." We have forgotten to refer to the page 
and volume. 



74 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



very rage of hunger and thirst, and lawless 
campaigning. 

Between Brentford and Ealing, Lysons in- 
forms us, that elephants' bones and similar 
phenomena have been dug up, — evidences of a 
former state of climate in this quarter of the 
world, when our planet was toasting a different 
cheek at the sun. 

The celebrated engagement between the 
King's and Parliament's forces took place at 
the south-west of Brentford, near Sion House. 
A Sunday intervened ; and it is said, that the 
quantity of " victuals" sent out from London, 
to feed the worthy city belligerents, was im- 
mense. 

This town takes its name from the little 
river Brent, which helps to give such a pretty 
look to the entrance of the village of Hendon. 
Fuller speaks of a gardener living here at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, who, at 
seventy-six years of age, could afford, in the 
course of three days, to lose more than sixty 
ounces of blood, to cure him of an inflamma- 
tion of the lungs ; which it did — " a most emi- 
nent instance," adds he, "against those who 
endeavour to prove the decay of the world, 
because men cannot spare so much by blood- 
letting as in former ages." 

Sion House was originally a Bridgetine con- 
vent, in which monks and nuns lived under 
the same roof, though in separate cloisters. 
At the dissolution of the monasteries, by Henry 
the Eighth, it was very ill spoken of ; not the 
less perhaps for being accused of siding with 
his antagonist, the Maid of Kent. Katharine 
Howard was confined in this house before her 
execution. Queen Mary made Sir Henry 
Sidney (Sir Philip's father) keeper of the 
Parks and Woods ; and after being again mo- 
nasticized, and again dissolved, Elizabeth 
gave the estate to the Northumberland family, 
with whom it has since remained. The Sac- 
charissa of Waller (Dorothy Sidney, a grand- 
daughter of Henry Earl of Northumberland,) 
was born there. 

Osterley House, the seat of the Jerseys, a 
little further on, upon the other side of the 
way, was built by the celebrated merchant, Sir 
Thomas Gresham. It was subsequently occu- 
pied by Sir Edward Coke, by the Desmond fa- 
mily, and by Sir William Waller, the Parlia- 
mentary general ; and at the beginning of the 
last century, became the property of Sir Fran- 
cis Child, the banker, whose descendants 
brought it, by marriage, into the Jersey fa- 
mily. Two curious stories are told of it ; one 
by Fuller in his ' Worthies, ' the other in the 
Strafford Letters. The latter we copy from 
Lysons, who relates them both ; but we prefer 
hearing good, old, quaint, eloquent Fuller 
speak for himself. 

"Osterley House," says he, "now Sir Wil- 
liam Waller's, must not be forgotten, built in 



a park by Sir Thomas Gresham, who here 
magnificently entertained and lodged Queen 
Elizabeth. Her Majesty found fault with the 
court of this house as too great, affirming, 
1 that it would appear more handsome, if di- 
vided with a wall in the middle.' 

" What doth Sir Thomas, but in the night- 
time sends for workmen to London (money 
commands all things,) who so speedily and 
silently apply their business, that the next 
morning discovered that court double, which 
the night had left single before. It is ques- 
tionable whether the Queen next day was 
more contented with the conformity to her 
fancy, or more pleased with the surprise and 
sudden performance thereof ; whilst her cour- 
tiers disported themselves with their several 
expressions, some avowing it was no wonder 
he could so soon change a building Avho could 
build a 'Change; others (reflecting on some 
known differences in this Knight's family) 
affirmed, ' that any house is easier divided than 
united' " * 

The other story is thus quoted by Lysons 
from the letters above-mentioned : — " Young 
Desmond (says Mr. Garrard, writing to Lord 
Wentworth), who married one of the co-heirs 
of Sir Michael Stanhope, came one morning 
to York House, where his wife had long lived 
with the Duchess during his two years' ab- 
sence beyond the seas, and hurried her away, 
half undressed, much against her will, into a 
coach, and so carried her away into Leicester- 
shire. At Brickhill he lodged, where she, in 
the night, put herself into milkmaid's clothes, 
and had likely to make her escape, but was 
discovered. Madam Christian, whom your 
Lordship knows, said, that my Lord of Des- 
mond was the first that ever she heard of that 
ran away with his own wife." 

The case has often happened, where money 
was concerned. The Countess afterwards 
came to Osterley Park with her husband, and 
bore him a numerous family. 

It should have been mentioned, in justice to 
Brentford, that we did not observe the " dirty 
street" in it mentioned by Gay. At least, the 
High-street looked smart and comfortable. 
All the thoroughfares in towns near London, 
and indeed almost all that we saw of any con- 
sequence in our journey, have wonderfully 
plucked up, and smugged themselves of late 
years. The communication which is now 
grown so general between all parts of the 
country, renders all of them, in some measure, 
like neighbours ; and what is done by one 
town, for the sake of neatness and ascendancy, 
gets done by another. You see a regular pave- 
ment, smart London-looking shops, a circulat- 
ing library, milliner's, watchmaker's, &c. ; and 
the coach halts at a fine-looking inn, with large 
coach-yard, door, and other appurtenances, of 

* ' Worthies of England,' vol. ii. 1811, p. 45. 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



75 



the newest town fashion ; out of which comes 
a smart waiter or landlord, no more anxious 
or civil in his countenance than the waiter of 
a well-to-do inn ought to be, and who does not 
seem to care whether you lunch or not. Mean- 
while " Miss," if she is pretty or well-dressed, 
gives a look out at the threshold, with an eye 
still more indifferent, and glancing everywhere 
but at the faces she is thinking of. Passengers 
descend, to stretch their legs for ten mhrutes, 
the inside and out reconnoitring one another ; 
the "young woman" remains by her bundle ; 
the gentleman in the travelling-cap longs to 
know where the gentleman in the shooting- 
jacket is going, but not having dined yet, has 
not acquired confidence enough to speak; and 
the invalid gentleman eats a biscuit, — or ex- 
tremely declines it. 



LXV.— A JOURNEY BY COACH. 

(fragment concluded.) 

Coach-horses — What do they think of the Coach? — 
Hounslow, its Thieves and Gunpowder — Desideratum in 
Fighting — The Wheat of Heston — Singular fertility of 
Berkshire and Buckinghamshire in illustrious Memories 
— Extinction of the Hiprhwavman. 



When - a coach sets off again from its stoppage 
at an inn-door, there is a sense of freshness and 
re-commencement ; the inside passengers settle 
themselves in their corners, or interchange legs, 
or take a turn on the outside ; the outside 
j adjust themselves to their seats and their bits 
of footing ; the young woman looks, for the 
ninety-ninth time, to her box ; the coachman 
is indifferent and scientific ; he has the ease 
of power in his face ; he shakes the reins ; 
throws out a curve or so of knowing whip, 
as an angler does his line ; and the horses 
begin to ply their never-ending jog. A horse's 
hind-leg on the road, to any eye looking down 
upon it, seems as if it would jaunt on for ever; 
the muscle works in the thigh ; the mane at 
the same time dances a little bit ; the hock- 
joint looks intensely angular, and not to be hit 
(it is horrible to think of wbunding it) ; the 
hoof bites into the earth ; wheels and legs 
seem made to work together like machinery ; 
and on go the two patient creatures, they know 
not why nor whither, chewing the unsatisfac- 
tory bit, wondering (if they wonder at all) why 
they may not hold their heads down, and have 
tails longer than five inches ; and occasionally 
giving one another's noses a consolatory caress. 
It is curious to see sometimes how this affec- 
tion seems to be all on one side. One of the 
horses goes dumbly talking, as it were, to the 
other, and giving proofs of the pleasure and 
comfort it takes in its society ; while the other, 
making no sort of acknowledgment, keeps the 
" even tenor of its way," turning neither to 
the right nor left, nor condescending to give or 



receive the least evidences of the possibility of 
a satisfaction. It seems to say, " You may be 
as amiable and patient as you please ; — for 
my part, I am resolved to be a mere piece of 
the machinery, and to give these fellows behind 
us no reason whatsoever to suppose that I 
make any sentimental compromise with their 
usurpations over us." 

Horses in a coach must certainly be the 
most patient, or the most indifferent, or the 
most unthinking of animals. The mule seems 
to have an opinion of his own ; he is not to be 
driven so easily. The dog (till the new act) 
passed a horrible, unsatisfied time of it under 
the butcher's or baker's go-cart. Harnessed ele- 
phants would be inconvenient. They would be 
for re-adjusting their buckles, and making in- 
quiries with their trunks into the behaviour of 
the postilion. They might, to be sure, help with 
the other trunks, and perform the part of half 
horse, half hostler. The llama of Peru has 
inconvenient tricks, if you ill-use him ; and so 
has the camel. But the horse, when once he 
is ground well into the road, seems to give up 
having any sort of mind of his own — that is 
to say, if he ever had any, except what his 
animal spirits made to be mistaken for it ; for 
the breeding of horses is such in England, that, 
generally speaking, when they are not all 
blood and fire, they seem nothing but stupid 
acquiescence, without will, without curiosity, 
without the power of being roused into resist- 
ance, except, poor souls ! when their last hour 
is come, and non-resistance itself can go no 
further, but lies down to die. We dock their 
tails, to subject them to the very flies ; fasten 
their heads back, to hinder them from seeing 
their path ; and put blinkers at their eyes, for 
fear of their getting used to the phenomena of 
the carriage and wheels behind them. What 
must they think (if they think at all) of the 
eternal mystery thus tied to their bodies, and 
rattling and lumbering at their heels ? — of the 
load thus fastened to them day by day, going 
the same road for no earthly object (intelli- 
gible to the horse capacity), and every now and 
then depositing, and taking up, other animals 
who walk on their hind-legs, and occasionally 
come and stroke their noses, kick their bellies, 
and gift them with iron shoes ? 

Well, circumstances drive us, as we drive 
the horses, — perhaps with as many smiling 
remarks on the part of other beings, at our 
thinking as little of the matter :~— so we must 
be moving on. 

Hounslow (the stage we have now come to) 
is a good place for setting us upon reflections 
on horse and man, not merely by reason of the 
number of accommodations for both those tra- 
vellers, but because of its celebrity at various 
times for its horse-races, its highwaymen, and 
its powder-mills. The series of heaths here 
from Hounslow to Bagshot, are the scenes of 
the favourite robberies and sta<?e-coach alarms 



; 76 



A JOURNEY BY COACH. 



of the last century. The novels and Newgate 
Calendars are full of them. Nor is the dis- 
trict without its historical minacities. Here 
poor James the Second got up a camp to resist 
his subjects with, and must needs take his 
Queen and his daughter Anne to dine there, 
to let them see how victorious he was going to 
be ; nay, he wrote to the Prince of Orange upon 
the fineness of his troops ; which the latter 
accordingly came over to congratulate him 
upon, as William the Third. 

" Am I to have the honour of taking the air 
with you, sir, this evening upon the heath?" 
says one of the heroes of the ' Beggar's Opera,' 
to their noble Captain .Mcic-Heath ; who de- 
rived his title, observe, from that ground of his 
exploits : — " I drink a dram now and then with 
the stage-coachmen, in the way of friendship 
and intelligence ; and I know that about this 
time there will be passengers upon the western 
road who are worth speaking with." 

And then follows a generous conversation 
about honour and fidelity, with certain glimpses 
of the interior of their cabinet policy ; and the 
meeting concludes, instead of a ministerial 
dinner, with that glorious song, " Let us take 
the road," the music of which is justly " bor- 
rowed for the occasion," like a crown-jewel, 
from Handel's "March in Scipio." We dare 
confidently appeal to any ingenuous reader, 
who has heard it sung, and who has seen those 
" great irregular spirits" in their exaltation and 
ragged coats, passing by their leader with step 
and chorus, and taking their hats off, one by 
one, to his own elegantly lifted beaver, whether 
there is much difference, if any, between those 
mutual acknowledgments of energy and a great 
purpose, and others which take place on more 
public occasions. For our parts, we confess, as 
Sir Philip Sydney did of the ballad of" Chevy 
Chace," that we never hear it but we feel our 
" heart moved as with the sound of a trumpet ;" 
and it raised a late noble lord twenty-fold in 
our opinion — nay, let us see that he had a truly 
" statesman-like" view of things, and an he- 
roical cast in his character, when we heard 
that he was a great admirer of this song and 
of the whole opera. We have been told that 
he not only applauded it in public, but would get 
ladies to play it to him on the piano-forte, and 
hum over the airs himself with an exquisite 
superiority to his incompetency*. 

* Lord Castlereagh. We forget who told us the anec- 
dote, and are not in the way of ascertaining the truth of 
it ; but we have heard other stories of his good nature, 
that render it likely. His lordship, like so many other 
statesmen of all parties, was the victim of a perplexed 
state of society, which seems of necessity to divide a man 
into two contradictory beings, — the public and the pri- 
vate ; and, unfortunately, he did not see that this state 
was a transitory one, and not the inevitable condition of 
humanity. It is not likely indeed that he would refine 
upon this speculation in ordinary, or perhaps think of it 
at all. He was too busy, and, as it appeared to him, too 
successful. But there is no knowing how much thought 
and wonder crowded into his brain before he died, and 



Hounslow Heath is not a place which the 
old gentleman in the play would like to live 
in, who made such a fearful construction of a 
metaphor in a letter, and was always fancying 
that he and his were " all to be blown up." 
A very serious blowing up does in fact occa- 
sionally take place here, strewing the limbs 
and heads of the manufacturers of gunpowder 
about the place, as if in rebuke of their trade. 
It is a pity that science does not hasten that 
most blessed of all its discoveries, which was 
talked of the other day, and which is to settle 
any two contending armies in ten minutes, by 
blowing them respectively to atoms ! They 
have only to meet, it seems, and give the word, 
and at the first explosion they are abolished — 
that is to say, provided one of them does not 
contrive to speak first : — so that war would be 
reduced to a race for the first word, and the 
most precipitate speaker be the conqueror 
crowned with laurel. In a little while, it is 
clear that there would be no war at all ; and 
then mankind, out of pure unheroical neces- 
sity, would be forced to be reasonable in their 
disputes, and let common sense be the arbiter. 
At present the grand thing is to say, " You 
lie," and " You lie," and then to fall pell-mell 
together by the ears, and be the death of thou- 
sands of your fellow-creatures, to the sound of 
drum and trumpet. There is something fine 
in this undoubtedly, especially for those who 
have to pay for it, or who are burnt, maimed, 
slaughtered, or sent to the hospital, in the 
process. But somehow it puts the very con- 
querors upon grave faces, and makes them 
feel like slaves to an evil thing, and keeps up 
the belief in the " vale of tears ;" and people 
in their senses and cool moments prefer the 
idea of a healthy condition of humanity, and a 
game at cricket on a green. But rail-roads 
will be the peace-makers. 

Hounslow Heath is to the left of our road : — 
let us give a glance to the right, and refresh 
ourselves with thinking of that peaceful agri- 
cultural district stretching from this parish to 
Harrow-on- the-Hill, and famous for the finest 
wheat in England. Queen Elizabeth had her 
bread from it. Fuller has recorded one end 
of it in his prose, and Drayton the other in his 
poetry. 

" The best (wheat) in England," says Fuller, 
" groweth in the vale lying south of Harrow- 
on-the-Hill, nigh Hesson (Heston, the parish 
in which Hounslow lies), where Providence 
for the present hath fixed my habitation ; so 
that the King's bread was formerly made of the 
fine flower thereof. Hence it was that Queen 
Elizabeth received no composition from the 

found him unprepared to entertain them. Peace to his 
memory and his mistakes, and to those of all of us .' In 
spite of his errors, he had something noble in his nature, 
as well as in his countenance. We shall never thoroughly 
know how to master the circumstances that make us 
what we are, till we learn to leave off fighting with, and 
reproaching one another. 



INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF THE SUBJECT OF CHRISTMAS. 



77 



villages thereabouts, but took her wheate in 
kinde, for her own pastry and bakehouse*." 

"As Coin came on along, and chanced to cast her eye 
Upon that neighbouring hill where Harrow stands so high, 
She Peryvale perceived, prank'd up with wreaths of wheat, 
And with exulting terms thus glorying in her seat : — 
' Why should not I be coy, and of my beauties nice, 
Since this my goodly grain is held of highest price? 
No manchet can so well the courtly palate please, 
As that made of the meal fetch'd from my fertile leas ;' " &c. 
Drayton's Polyolbion, Song XI V. 

Hounslow, whatever be its reputation, is in 
a truly glorious neighbourhood. Draw a circle 
of a few miles round Windsor, and you have 
Cowley at Chertsey, Pope at Twickenham and 
at "Windsor Forest, the Earl of Surrey in the 
Castle, Gray at Stoke Pogeis and at Eton, 
Milton at Horton, and Magna Charta at Run- 
nymede. Buckinghamshire and Berkshire 
(with the exception of London) comprise per- 
haps the most illustrious district in England, 
unless Shakspeare alone raises Warwickshire 
above them ; and the road in this quarter leads 
even to him, besides visiting Chaucer by the 
way. But Chaucer is also to be found in Berk- 
shire, at Donnington Castle ; Spenser in Buck- 
inghamshire, at Whaddon, with his friend Lord 
Grey, to whom he was secretary ; Shakspeare 
himself (as far as one of his most living cre- 
ations is concerned) at Windsor, with Falstaff 
and the Merry Wives ; Milton at Horton afore- 
said, where he passed much of his youth ; and, 
besides others before mentioned, we have 
Hampden at Hampden, Burke and Waller at 
Beaconsfield, Hooker at Drayton-Beauchamp, 
Cowper at Olney, Denham at Cooper's Hill, 
Hales, Wotton, and half the education of Eng- 
land, at Eton, — the whole weight of Windsor 
Castle and its memories, — and at Wantage we 
have Alfred the Great, a world of a man in 
himself. Doubtless there are more honours for 
the two counties ; but we happen to be writing 
without the first volume of Fuller, and these 
are all we can recollect. They include three 
out of the four great poets of EDgland, as 
regards residence of some duration — a thing 
that can be said of no other district of equal 
length, the metropolis excepted ; and it is 
curious, that within a segment of it the very 
names of the towns and villages seem resolved 
to be literary and renowned, comprising Den- 
ham, Drayton, Cowley, Milton, Hampden, and 
Penn. We are mistaken if we have not seen 
a stage-coach enter London with three of these 
names upon its panel, — we think Denham, 
Drayton, and Cowley. 

We have omitted to observe how completely 
the Macheath order of highwaymen has gone 
out, — he who used to be mounted on horseback, 
and stop coaches, and put half-a-dozen people 
in fear of their lives. Guards, rapidity of 
driving, and other facilities of self-defence, the 
publicity of the roads, quickness of communi- 

* ' Worthies of England,' vol. ii., p. 34, 



cation, &c, have extinguished him. He is as 
completely abolished as the wolves. No more 
can he swagger and bully, and call himself 
Captain, and seduce inn-keepers' daughters, 
and be hung like a man of spirit. He is a 
sneaker now round the gaming-tables ; or rides 
on the coach which he used to stop, and filches 
bankers' conveyances. 

[These articles were cut short by the stoppage of the 
Journal in which they appeared.] 



LXVI.— INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF THE 
SUBJECT OF CHRISTMAS. 

So many things have been said of late years 
about Christmas, that it is supposed by some 
there is no saying more. Oh they of little 
faith ! What % do they suppose that every- 
thing has been said that can be said, about any 
one Christmas thing ? 

About beef, "for instance ? 

About plum-pudding ? 

About mince-pie ? 

About holly ? 

About ivy ? 

About rosemary ? 

About misletoe ? (Good God ! what an im- 
mense number of things remain to be said 
about misletoe ?) 

About Christmas-eve ? 

About hunt-the-slipper ? 

About hot-cockles ? 

About blind-man's-buff ? 

About shoeing the wild-mare ? 

About thread-the-needle ? 

About he-can-do-little-that-can't-do-this ? 

About puss-in-the-corner ? 

About snap-dragon % 

About forfeits ? 

About Miss Smith ? 

About the bell-man ? 

About the waits ? 

About chilblains ? 

About carols ? 

About the fire ? 

About the block on it ? 

About school-boys ? 

About their mothers ? 

About Christmas-boxes ? 

About turkeys ? 

About Hogmany ? 

About goose-pie ? 

About mumming ? 

About saluting the apple-trees ? 

About brawn ? 

About plum-porridge ? 

About hobby-horse ? 

About hoppings ? 

About wakes? 

About " Feed-the-dove ?" 

About hackins ? 

About yule-doughs ? 

About going-a-gooding ? 

About loaf-stealing ? 



78 



INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF THE SUBJECT OF CHRISTMAS. 



About julMaps ? (Who lias exhausted that 
subject, we should like to know ?) 

About wad-shooting ? 

About elder- wine ? 

About pantomimes ? 

About cards ? 

About New- Year's day ? 

About gifts ? 

About wassail ? 

About twelfth-cake ? 

About king and queen ? 

About characters ? 

About eating too much ? 

About aldermen ? 

About the doctor ? 

About all being in the wrong ? 

About Charity"? 

About all being in the right ? 

About Faith, Hope, and Endeavour ? 

About the Greatest Plum-pudding for the 
Greatest Number ? 

Esto perpetua ; that is, Faith, Hope, and 
Charity, and Endeavour ; and plum-pudding 
enough, by-and-by, all the year round, for 
everybody that likes it. Why that should not 
be the case, we cannot see, — seeing that the 
earth is big, and human kind teachable, and 
God very good, and inciting us to do it. — 
Meantime, gravity apart, we ask anybody whe- 
ther any of the above subjects are exhausted ; 
and we inform everybody, that all the above 
customs still exist in some parts of our beloved 
country, however unintelligible they may have 
become in others. — But to give a specimen of 
the non-exhaustion of any one of their topics. 

Beef, for example. Now we should like to 
know who has exhausted the subject of the 
fine old roast Christmas piece of beef,— from 
its original appearance in the meadows as part 
of the noble sultan of the herd, glorious old 
Taurus, the lord of the sturdy brow and pon- 
derous agility, a sort of thunderbolt of a beast, 
well chosen by Jove to disguise in, one of Na- 
ture's most striking compounds of apparent 
heaviness and unencumbered activity, — up to 
its contribution to the noble Christmas dinner, 
smoking from the spit, and flanked by the 
outposts of Bacchus. John Bull (cannibalism 
apart) hails it like a sort of relation. He 
makes it part of his flesh and blood ; glories in 
it ; was named after it ; has it served up, on 
solemn occasions, with music and a hymn, as 
it was the other day at the royal city dinner : — 

" Oh ! the roast beef of old England ; 
And oh ! the old English roast beef. " 

" And oh !" observe ; not merely a oh ! " again ; 
but "and" with it ; as if, though the same 
piece of beef, it were also another ; — another 
and the same ; — cut, and come again ; — making 
two of one, in order to express intensity and 
reduplication of satisfaction : — 

" Oh ' the roast beef of old England ; 
And oh ! the old English roast beef. " 



We beg to assure the reader, that a whole 
Seer might be written on this single point 
of the Christmas dinner ; and " shall we be 
told" (as orators exclaim) " and this too in a 
British land," that the subjectis "exhausted"!!! 
Then plum-pudding ! What a word is that ! 
how plump, and plump again ! How round, 
and repeated, and plenipotential ! (There are 
two p's, observe, in plenipotential, and so there 
are in plum-pudding. We love an exquisite 
fitness, — a might and wealth of adaptation.) 
Why, the whole round cheek of universal 
childhood is in the idea of plum-pudding ; ay, 
and the weight of manhood, and the pleni- 
tude of the majesty of city dames. Wealth 
itself is symbolised by the least of its fruity 
particles. "A plum" is a city fortune, — a 
million of money. He (the old boy, who has 
earned it) 

Puts in his thumb, 

videlicet, into his pocket, 

And pulls out a plum, 

And says what a ' ' good man " am I. 

Observe a little boy at a Christmas dinner, and 
his grandfather opposite him. What a world 
of secret similarity there is between them. 
How hope in one, and retrospection in the 
other, and appetite in both, meet over the 
same ground of pudding, and understand it to 
a nicety. How the senior banters the little 
boy on his third slice ; and how the little boy 
thinks within himself that he dines that day 
as well as the senior. How both look hot, 
and red, and smiling, and juvenile. How the 
little boy is conscious of the Christmas-box in 
his pocket ; (of which indeed the grandfather 
jocosely puts him in mind ;) and how the 
grandfather is quite as conscious of the plum, 
or part of a plum, or whatever fraction it may 
be, in his own. How he incites the little boy 
to love money and good dinners all his life ; 
and how determined the little boy is to abide 
by his advice, — with a secret addition in favour 
of holidays and marbles, — to which there is an 
analogy, in the senior's mind, on the side of 
trips to Hastings, and a game at whist. Finally, 
the old gentleman sees his own face in the 
pretty smooth one of the child ; and if the 
child is not best pleased at his proclamation of 
the likeness (in truth, is horrified at it, and 
thinks it a sort of madness,) yet nice observers, 
who have lived long enough to see the wonder- 
ful changes in people's faces from youth to 
age, probably discern the thing well enough ; 
and feel a movement of pathos at their hearts, 
in considering the world of trouble and emo- 
tion that is the causer of the changes. That 
old man's face was once like that little boy's ! 
That little boy's will be one day like that old 
man's ! What a thought to make us all love 
and respect one another, if not for our fine 
qualities, yet, at least, for the trouble and 
sorrow which we all go through ! 



INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF THE SUBJECT OF CHRISTMAS. 



79 



Ay, and joy too ! for all people have their 
joys as well as troubles, at one time or an- 
other ; most likely both together, or in con- 
stant alternation ; and the greater part of 
troubles are not the worst things in the world, 
but only graver forms of the requisite motion 
of the universe, or workings towards a better 
condition of things, the greater or less violent 
according as we give them violence for 
violence, or respect them like awful but not 
ill-meaning gods, and entertain them with a 
rewarded patience. — Grave thoughts, you will 
say, for Christmas. But no season has a 
greater right to grave thoughts, in passing ; 



and for that very reason, no season has a 
greater right to let them pass, and recur to 
more light ones. 

So a noble and merry season to you, my 
masters ; and may we meet, thick and three- 
fold, many a time and oft in blithe yet most 
thoughtful pages. Fail not to call to mind, in 
the course of the 25th of this month, that the 
Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was 
born on that day, and then smile and enjoy 
yourselves for the rest of it, for mirth is also 
of heaven's making, and wondrous was the 
wine-drinking at Galilee. 



THE END. 



10NDON S 
BRADBURY AND BVANS, PRINTERS, WHlTEFRIARS. 



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